Volume 4 Issue 10, October 2020

Our non-Black colleagues must fight anti-Black racism and white supremacy within the academy to authentically promote Black excellence. Amplifying Black excellence in ecology and evolution is the antidote for white supremacy in the academy.

We know that it can be tough to be a person of colour working in ecology and evolution. Here is what has worked for us.

As early-career Black women, we argue that encouraging assimilation is not enough to address systemic racism and outline suggestions for how minoritized individuals can not only survive, but thrive, in ecology and evolutionary biology.

As conservation organizations seek to create inclusive communities, they should reflect on current experiences. Using interview vignettes, we bring to attention the isolation and discrimination experienced by scientists who are Black, Indigenous and people of colour, alongside additional burdens of diversity and inclusion work.

Founder of conservation biology, expansive thinker and inspiring mentor.

An in-depth analysis of how pathogen prevalence among both bees and flowers changes over the course of a growing season reveals the complex dynamics of how infection risk changes with species diversity, abundance and phenology.

In Africa, COVID-19 has created a perfect storm of reduced funding, restrictions on the operations of conservation agencies, and elevated human threats to nature. This Perspective discusses solutions to move beyond this immediate crisis.

Tulloch details a six-step timeline that improves ecology and conservation conference inclusion by embedding diversity and equity into planning, financing, marketing, scientific and social scheduling, evaluation and reporting.

An assessment of the habitat of native vertebrate species burnt by the 2019–2020 Australian mega-fires shows that 70 taxa were severely affected.

Comparing historical records with contemporary camera trap surveys, the authors report widespread declines in the occurrence of four large carnivore species from protected areas within the distributional range of the giant panda.

Analysing archaic and modern human genomes, the authors show that Neanderthal introgression reintroduced thousands of lost ancestral variants with gene regulatory activity and that these reintroduced alleles are more tolerated by modern humans than introgressed Neanderthal-derived alleles.

Multiproxy archaeobotanical analyses of an abandoned agricultural terrace at Wagadagam document extensive, low-intensity forms of plant management from at least 2,145–1,930 cal yr bp and intensive forms of cultivation at 1,376–1,293 cal yr bp.

Combining global eddy covariance observations and photosynthesis estimates from terrestrial biosphere models, the authors demonstrate widespread acclimation of photosynthesis to light in natural environments, with croplands showing stronger acclimation rates than forests or grasslands.

Screening >100 bee and >80 flower species for five common microparasites over 26 weeks, the authors show that parasite prevalence increases in bees toward the end of the growing season, but decreases on plants, and is related to bee diversity, abundance and community composition.

Analysing >5,000 population abundance time series for insects and other arthropods from 68 sites within the US Long Term Ecological Research network, the authors find high variation but no overall trend in abundance and diversity among sites and taxa.

Analysing global high-resolution three-dimensional maps of forest structure, the authors show that only half of the world’s remaining moist tropical forest has both high structural integrity and low human pressure, and they outline a framework for its conservation and restoration.

By exposing an experimental 34-species bacterial community to different levels of pulse antibiotic disturbance with or without immigration, the authors identify a highly repeatable community response, the magnitude of which increases with increasing antibiotic levels.

Males of the malaria vector species Anopheles arabiensis and Anopheles gambiae produce and release aggregation pheromones that attract individuals to the swarm, enhancing mating success. The authors argue that manipulating such pheromones could increase the efficacy of malaria-vector control programmes.

An automation-enabled evolution experiment in which genes from across the tree of life are introduced into Escherichia coli shows that mutations that upregulate the introduced gene can mitigate fitness defects without the need for coding changes.

Diversification trajectories of skeletal non-colonial marine families show increased capacity of marine ecosystems to accommodate highly diverse communities over the Phanerozoic.

Comparing Mexican cavefish from rivers with those from caves, the authors show increased sensitivity of the innate and adaptive immune system that is accompanied by a reduced investment in the innate immune system as an evolutionary response to lower parasite diversity.