Volume 2 Issue 2, February 2018

Intergenerational rights to a healthy environment are protected by the constitutions of 74% of the world’s nations. These explicit commitments and similar, ancient principles of sovereign public trust are often overlooked but, if enforced, they offer sustainable protection for the biosphere.

Felix Finkbeiner founded Plant-for-the-Planet as a nine year old. In the ten years since then, 15 billion trees have been planted globally as part of the initiative. Tom Crowther was inspired by this mission, and decided to help by conducting a research project to map the world’s trees, revealing that there are just over 3 trillion trees on Earth. We spoke to them both about their collaboration.

Large-scale analysis of faunal similarity reveals the interconnectedness of Miocene savannah ecosystems, but also the need for more fossils to fill the gaps in the African palaeontological record.

Until recently, human dispersals out of Africa and into the Levant early in Marine Isotope Stage 5 (around 126–74 ka) were characterized as a precursor to a later, more successful out of Africa event. Recently discovered archaeological evidence from Asia challenges this story and helps challenge what we see as dispersal success.

The earliest animal diversification has been associated with increased oxygenation. Here an alternative model is proposed: hypoxia-inducible transcription factors gave animals unprecedented control of cell stemness that allowed them to cope with fluctuating oxygen concentrations.

The poor reputation of predator and scavenger species belies their benefits to people, which include disease regulation, contributions to agriculture and waste disposal. These services should be emphasized in conservation considerations.

Genome-wide nucleotide composition varies greatly among species. Here, the authors show that genomic G + C composition is driven by mutation bias but is also modified by natural selection or biased gene conversion.

Savannah faunas developed in a spatially and temporally connected palaeobiome that flourished in the mid Miocene, before fragmenting into Eurasian and African branches in the late Miocene.

Mathematical modelling combined with activity-tracking data from 73 terrestrial carnivore species reveals positive scaling between body size and the proportion of active time devoted to foraging until around 5 kg, after which negative scaling occurs.

Experiments with populations of great tits found that aposematic prey were avoided over cryptic species, not solely through individual experience, but based on observation of conspecifics’ experience tasting unpalatable prey.

A theoretical model with supporting empirical evidence shows that plants, animals and microbes have approximately equal fitness due to a trade-off between generation time and production, constrained within biophysical boundaries.

Two long-term diversity manipulation experiments over an environmental gradient provide insights into how loss of biodiversity affects ecosystem functioning: the invariant consequences of biodiversity loss for multifunctionality; and the possibility that similar multifunctionality values across differing ecosystems may mask individual effects of biodiversity loss.

A microcosm experiment replicated across 14 laboratories shows that deliberate inclusion of genetic variation enhances the reproducibility of an ecological study.

Evolutionary distinctness is used as a metric to determine conservation priorities across all Chondrichthyes, identifying 21 countries with the highest richness, endemism and evolutionary distinctness of threatened species as targets.

Carbon isotopic analysis reveals global biogeographic traits in shark trophic interactions, and sheds light on the diverse foraging behaviour of sharks.

High-throughput metabarcoding of coral reef fish larvae from the Red Sea enables species-level reconstruction of the highly biodiverse larval community, and their spatio-temporal distribution and abundance.

Analysis of sedimentary DNA from ten European lakes reveals that over the past 100 years cyanobacterial communities have become compositionally and phylogenetically more similar, in line with homogenization of lake environmental conditions.

Analysing >1 million river invertebrates from nine biogeographic regions, the authors show that functional trait diversity increases consistently as glacier cover decreases.

Biological responses to ocean acidification will depend on variation in tolerance and phenotypic plasticity over different timescales. This study of the spiny damselfish demonstrates the importance of parental variation and transgenerational effects in the response of fish to ocean acidification.

Genetic sex determination (GSD) is more common in animals than environmental sex determination. Here, the authors show that the prevalence of GSD is due to the coupling of genes that bias offspring sex ratios towards one sex with genes that are beneficial in that sex but costly in the other.

The ability of a species to adapt to climate change depends on its genetic diversity. Here, based on the geographic distribution of genetic variants associated with drought resistance in Arabidopsis thaliana, the authors predict the future genetic maladaptation of Central European populations.

In individual bacteria, restriction–modification systems inhibit both lytic and lysogenic infection by bacteriophage. But at a population level, restriction–modification systems increase the probability of lysogeny by delaying infection onset.

The sequences of human β-globin orthologues from 15 deer species were determined and used in protein structural modelling to identify a sickling mechanism that differs from that seen in erythrocytes in human sickle-cell disease.

A transcriptomic analysis of Plasmodium falciparum in infected children finds that parasites in areas of low transmission intensity invest more in transmission to new hosts (reproduction) and less in within-host replication (growth) than parasites in high-transmission areas.

Secondary school students in the United Kingdom with lower initial levels of acceptance of evolution show lower increases in understanding of evolution in response to teaching of the topic than those students with initially higher acceptance scores. These lower-acceptance students are more likely to be in teacher-stratified lower-ability classes and also have lower responses to teaching of genetics.

Soliciting expert feedback from the editorial boards of seven ecology journals, the authors compile a list of the top 100 most highly recommended articles in the field of ecology.