Volume 2 Issue 9, September 2018

Recently publicized killings of environmental defenders are the latest iteration of a long and tragic history of violent conflict over access to land and resources. To bring about effective change, we must first understand the drivers and conditions that lead to violence in the sphere of environmental and land conflict.

The emergence of chronic wasting disease among wild reindeer in Norway triggered the decision to eradicate an entire population of more than 2,000 animals. The cull, now complete, was a tremendously difficult process both politically and practically.

Global environmental change is largely indifferent to political boundaries, but meeting the challenges they pose in the future will inevitably require cross-border cooperation. We talk to David Lehrer, Executive Director at The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, about how this challenge is at the heart of their academic mission.

In many fish stocks, older and larger fish are found in deeper waters compared with younger individuals. This concept of ontogenetic deepening is now proposed to be a result of harvesting rather than a natural phenomenon.

A synthesis of epidemiological, laboratory and economic data provides suggestions for optimal vaccination strategies against foot-and-mouth disease in east African livestock.

Analysis from global fisheries and the Brazilian Amazon elaborates the links between financial flows through tax havens and environmental degradation.

The bilaterian mouth and anus evolved from a simple gut with one gastric opening. Here, the authors review comparative data on several organisms and conclude that the single opening probably evolved into both mouth and anus (amphistomy).

Whole genome data for 221 geo-referenced cultivated and wild accessions of pearl millet reveals their domestication centre in the western Sahara, 4,900 years ago.

More diverse plant communities show increasing productivity through time. Here, the authors show that evolutionary selection for facilitative interactions occurs only in mixtures, whereas selection for reduced competition occurs in both monocultures and mixtures.

A new species of Late Triassic pterosaur, Caelestiventus hanseni, predates all other known desert pterosaurs by 65 million years, showing that from an early point in their evolution, pterosaurs were widely geographically distributed and capable of dwelling in harsh environments.

Logarithmic scales are frequently used in ecological data display, but the degree to which they are understood is not clear. Here, the authors survey members of the Ecological Society of America and find that only 56% of respondents correctly interpreted data presented on log–log axes.

Outlining a framework based on a generalized plant–soil feedback model, the authors show that negative frequency-dependent feedback is necessary for the persistence of whole plant communities, and establish a quantitative metric for the strength of feedback needed for coexistence.

Analysing the structure of both plant–pollinator and host–parasitoid networks in calcareous grasslands, the authors reveal scale-dependent responses to habitat fragmentation in the structure and stability of different network types.

Combining parallel genome-wide association studies from both host plant (Arabidopsis thaliana) and insect herbivore (Pieris rapae) perspectives, plus a comparative analysis across diverse butterfly/plant systems, the authors identify core genes involved in herbivory.

Low-frequency vegetation optical depth (L-VOD) sensing reveals global patterns of seasonal variations in ecosystem-scale plant water storage and relationships with leaf phenology; results vary between tropical and temperate–boreal zones.

Data from 2 million individual trees spanning 1,781 species reveal that tropical forests can be grouped into four size-dependent life-history survival modes, the application of which in demographic simulations predicts biomass change.

Analysing a database of >1,800 field studies in the terrestrial Arctic, the authors identify large spatial biases in sampling, with nearly one-third of all citations derived from sites located within 50 km of two research stations.

A study of foot-and-mouth disease in Tanzanian livestock and buffalo populations identifies waves spreading through cattle herds across the region, and economic impacts to rural communities that could be alleviated by targeted vaccination.

Reconstructing bacterial diversity dynamics from phylogenies, the authors estimate that there are about 1.4–1.9 million extant bacterial lineages and that diversity has been continuously increasing over the past 1 billion years, although most lineages to have inhabited Earth are now extinct.

A population-genomic analysis of more than 800 isolates of Staphylococcus aureus, representing the breadth of host-species diversity, reveals details of the pathogen’s evolutionary trajectory, including how this has been influenced by animal domestication and antibiotic use.

Long-term selective breeding has produced strains of the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) with different behaviours. Here, the authors sequence the genomes of tame and aggressive strains to uncover the genetic regions that have responded to selection for behaviour.

Analysing >20,000 specimens from >4,500 species, the authors reveal an exceptional pattern of brain–body allometry among birds and mammals, consistent with the hypothesis that they have relaxed allometric constraints compared to other jawed vertebrates.

The nature of aspidin, the most primitive bone-like tissue, is controversial. Here, the authors show that aspidin is acellular dermal bone, suggesting that early vertebrates possessed a full repertoire of skeletal tissue types.

Sex-discordant selection causes intralocus sexual conflict as different alleles are favoured in each sex. Here, the authors show that the evolution of body size dimorphism—a trait with strong correlation between males and females—is arrested in Drosophila for many generations due to intralocus sexual conflict.