Volume 3 Issue 12, December 2019

Private-sector capital is needed to scale-up forest and landscape restoration initiatives globally. To ensure the delivery of social and environmental restoration objectives, investors need to be matched appropriately to different types of restoration projects, while policies need to realign investment incentives away from degradation-driving activities.

Analysis of the world’s longest-running insect monitoring programme finds little evidence to support steep declines in biomass across the United Kingdom over the past 50 years. Moth biomass showed a net increase, but a gradual post-1982 decline was found in certain land uses and for some moth families.

Temperature differences between cities and the countryside have been regarded as useful surrogates for ecological responses to climate warming. However, research reveals mismatch between the phenological responses to spatial and temporal temperature gradients as well as complex interactions between urbanization and climate.

A field test suggests that orally ingestible, spreadable vaccines to combat rabies will transmit widely among vampire bats in the wild, offering a more humane — and effective — alternative to the bat culling practiced throughout Latin America today.

The authors hypothesize an ancestral condition of indiscriminate sexual behaviours directed towards all sexes, rather than a state in which different-sex sexual behaviour is a baseline and same-sex sexual behaviour is anomalous.

Sex-determining systems are incredibly diverse. Here, the author reviews sex determination in non-model vertebrates and invertebrates, and discusses theoretical models that explain diversity in sex determination.

Analysing data from the world’s longest-running insect population database, the authors find that recent declines in UK moth biomass were preceded by a larger increase.

Interviews with local people and camera-trap surveys have led to the first scientifically confirmed sightings of the silver-backed chevrotain for more than 25 years. The news that this species is not extinct is tempered by major threats of habitat loss and poaching in the region.

The authors suggest that increased dispersal of marine animals from the Middle Ordovician onwards enhanced α diversity, providing a possible mechanism for the shift from β to α diversity as the major component of global diversity.

Analysing more than 22 million in situ phenological observations across two continents, the authors show that plants in areas with higher human population densities have more advanced flowering and leaf-out dates, but that this cannot be attributed solely to urban heat island effects.

Urbanization gradients do not make good field laboratories for predicting climate warming effects on phenology, according to the analysis of a 30 year dataset on plant phenology and temperature in different urbanized settings.

Glaciers are retreating globally due to climate change. A meta-analysis identifies factors that determine biodiversity response to glacier loss and shows that local increases in biodiversity favour generalist species, whereas specialist species are likely to lose out.

Whole genome sequencing and genome-wide association studies of ash trees affected by the invasive alien fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus are used to train a genomic prediction model, which could predict tree health with >65% accuracy.

Field studies of the bat-to-bat transfer and ingestion of fluorescent biomarkers as a proxy for an oral vaccine are combined with mathematical models to predict the efficacy of oral vaccines for reducing bat rabies outbreaks.

This study provides empirical evidence for the formation of vesicles from mixtures of single-chain amphiphiles under alkaline hydrothermal conditions, suggesting that such conditions favoured protocell formation at the origin of life.

Understanding the crucial conditions for metabolism in early life is challenging. Using network-based analysis, the authors infer an organo-sulfur proto-metabolic network fuelled by a thioester- and redox-driven variant of the reductive tricarboxylic acid cycle that was capable of producing lipids and keto acids.

By sequencing the genome of the seed beetle Callosobruchus maculatus, the authors explore genomic signatures of selection and expression of sex-biased genes.

This study reveals sex-dependent dominance reversal across a large autosomal supergene in the rainbow trout, a mechanism for the resolution of sexual conflict in a species that lacks differentiated sex chromosomes.

Mammals with invasive placentation are more vulnerable to malignancy. Here, the authors propose that the evolution of invasibility of stromal tissue affects both placental and cancer invasion and present in vitro evidence in human and bovine fibroblasts consistent with this hypothesis.

Inventory data from 90 lowland Amazonian forest plots and a phylogeny of 526 angiosperm genera were used to show that taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity are both predictive of wood productivity but not of biomass variation.