Volume 3 Issue 6, June 2019

As Bolivia approaches presidential elections in October 2019, the country’s environmental leadership is at stake. We discuss urgent challenges and opportunities for reconciling conservation and societal needs in this mega-diverse country.

Current mangrove planting schemes aimed at reversing global losses are prioritising short-term increases in area over long-term establishment. Without sound, evidence-based restoration policies, this approach could accelerate the demise of mangrove forests and the ecosystem services they provide.

The reduction in biodiversity after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event did not instantaneously create evolutionary opportunities for planktonic protists. Survivors instead re-diversified in pulses that followed morphological innovations.

Long-term data on sockeye salmon in Alaska show how warmer temperatures during the juvenile freshwater stage of this species can drive shifts in later life history patterns.

The authors of a new genomic study propose three distinct latitudinal clines of ancestry among modern Inner Eurasians, each built upon successive layers of admixture.

A review of the consequences of phenological mismatches from a population and evolutionary perspective, including a conceptual framework and priority questions for future research.

Analysing responses of 378 bird species to deforestation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the authors show that sensitivity to habitat loss is dependent on where a population is located within its range.

Suskityrannus hazelae gen. et sp. nov. is a small-bodied tyrannosauroid that bridges the gap between earlier, smaller tyrannosauroids and the gigantic, last-surviving tyrannosaurids of the terminal Cretaceous.

Analysis of planktic foraminifera dynamics in the wake of the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction shows that increases in morphologic complexity preceded changes in species diversity and that the construction of new morphospace constrained diversification speed following the extinction event.

Biogeochemistry of teeth from the Italian site of Grotta Paglicci show different mobility strategies for humans using the cave either side of the Last Glacial Maximum.

A non-parametric framework, including an application to empirical data, is presented for estimating the local structural stability of ecological communities under environmental changes.

Analysing a database of >200,000 feeding links between >5,000 species in terrestrial and aquatic food webs, the authors show that specific trait combinations can be used to predict which predator species are characterized by high body-mass ratio interactions with their prey.

Neotropical tree community composition shows opposing successional pathways for wet and dry forests, but as vegetation cover increases over time, trends converge. Selecting species that have similar wood density to early successional communities could improve reforestation prospects.

Quantifying the impact of multiple stressors on different life-history stages of sockeye salmon, the authors show that climate warming impacts the timing of migration from natal freshwater habitats, with knock-on effects for adult maturation in the ocean.

Interactions between members of a group may be influenced by their social relationships. Here, the authors track individuals’ trajectories within flocks of jackdaws and show that their social relationships transform local interactions and collective dynamics.

Mammals with antipronograde body plans which employ suspensory positional behaviours demonstrate elevated variation in numbers of presacral vertebrae compared to pronograde species which display constraint on presacral vertebral number independent of running speed.

Analysis of genomes from bonobo and chimpanzee populations reveals an ancient admixture event between bonobos and an extinct great ape several hundred thousand years ago and suggests introgression of functional genes from the archaic ape into bonobos.

Genome-wide data for 763 individuals from inner Eurasia reveal 3 admixture clines in present-day populations that mirror geography, illuminating the historic spread and mixture of peoples across the Eurasian steppe, taiga and tundra.

A method to infer the strength and rate of adaptation based on the influence of background selection to reduce the fixation rate of weakly beneficial alleles shows that weakly beneficial alleles contribute substantially to adaptation in humans.