Volume 3 Issue 2, February 2019

Ash forests in North America and Eurasia are rapidly being lost to two invasive alien species: the emerald ash borer and Chalara ash dieback fungus. We argue that better regulatory policy and science-based intervention can help slow losses, and recommend an international consortium to coordinate science-based intervention.

Debate surrounding the dilution effect hypothesis in disease ecology has reached such intensity that it is stymying further research. Yet collaborative progress is important for human health and biodiversity conservation.

Primatologist who gave voice to animal communication and cognition.

The importance of biodiversity for productive community functioning is emerging as one of a very few general rules in ecology, but evidence has been sparse that it applies in tropical coral reefs—until now.

An integration of 20 years of data on fisheries catch and reef habitat characteristics shows how bleaching-induced shifts in reefscapes change species abundances but may not impair total catch capacity.

Rapid evolution of morphological variations is shown to be linked to positions of coral reef fishes at trophic-web extremes. This finding suggests that current fishing practices on coral reefs that target top predators and seaweed-grazing fishes may undermine the potential for future species diversification.

Two soil respiration studies conducted at different spatial and temporal extents each find evidence that thermal adaptation of microbial communities compensates for loss of soil carbon under idealized conditions.

Radiocarbon dates from Spain put anatomically modern humans in southernmost Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, diminishing the case for late survival of Neanderthals in the region.

Influenza viruses undergo rapid antigenic evolution. Analysis of a large dataset of influenza virus sequences, using host age as a proxy for immune experience, shows no evidence for immune positive selection driving antigenic evolution in individual infected humans.

Clonal or isogenic model organisms allow for controlled replication, but their isolation from natural systems compromises their relevance for ecology and evolution research. However, a substantial number of vertebrate species reproduce clonally in nature and are an underused resource.

This Review discusses recent advances in our understanding of the evolutionary importance of ancient hybridization, adaptive introgression, and hybrid speciation brought about by whole genome data of non-model organisms.

Sixteen-month manipulation experiments in a degraded macroalgae-dominated tropical reef setting show that lower coral species richness suppresses growth and survivorship of multiple species.

Twenty years of catch data and habitat surveys in coral reef fisheries in the Seychelles reveal that total yields can be maintained after severe bleaching and associated regime shifts, but the stability of fisheries is reduced.

Large-scale phylogenetic analysis of coral reef fish species shows that functional traits evolve fastest in those at high and low trophic levels with narrow diet breadth.

During the Carboniferous–Permian transition, reduction of tropical wetlands accommodated emerging dryland-adapted amniote faunas from a western Pangaean epicentre.

New 43–45 ka dates for stone tool assemblages associated with anatomically modern humans (AMHs) at the southern Spanish site of Bajondillo suggest an early AMH incursion and weaken the case for late Neanderthal persistence in the region.

Comparison of nuclear and mitochondrial ancestry in admixed human populations from the Americas shows mitonuclear interactions with possible impacts on phenotypic variation in admixed individuals.

Measuring microbial respiration in soils collected for three years along a latitudinal gradient, the authors find lower respiration rates and greater plasticity in responses at sites with higher mean annual temperatures, consistent with adaptation to thermal regimes.

Undertaking an incubation study on soil collected from 110 dryland sites across the world, the authors show that the response of soil microbial respiration to temperature is consistent with that of adaptation to the ambient thermal regime.

Developing a modelling approach based on evolutionary game theory, the authors are able to successfully predict global patterns in belowground plant–symbiont distributions across biomes, as well as major patterns in nutrient cycling, succession and stability.

Analysing the stability of model food webs against changes in environmental noise, the authors show that increasingly positive autocorrelation is a more important determinant of stability than intrinsic food web characteristics.

Large-scale network analysis of invertebrate communities across >500 arable farms in the United Kingdom reveals that genetic modification for herbicide tolerance has little influence on overall network structure, which is largely shaped by crop type.

A global map of the distribution of polyploidy plant species shows that their frequency increases with latitude and is also strongly, though indirectly, affected by climate.

Detailed information is already available on the genotypic and phenotypic variation of Arabidopsis. Here, extensive georeferenced environmental data from natural populations are compiled to identify adaptive variation.

Analysis of de novo mutations in sequences of great ape parent-offspring trios suggests that mutation rates slowed down in the recent human lineage, reconciling dates from the fossil record.

Lineage tracking of barcoded Saccharomyces cerevisiae growing in nutrient-limited conditions finds that a predictable increase in genetic diversity through single-mutant lineages is followed by a crash in diversity, owing to the success of highly fit double mutants.

An analysis of 25,000 human seasonal influenza virus sequences reveals no distinguishable mutational patterns across individuals with different immune histories, suggesting a limited role of individual immune positive selection in the evolution these viruses.