Volume 4 Issue 6, June 2020

Conserving biodiversity for its own sake and conserving it to safeguard ecosystem services are distinct goals that cannot both be achieved through a single target analogous to climate’s 1.5 °C, argues Andy Purvis.

Species distribution models are a powerful tool for ecological inference, but not every use is biologically justified. Applying these tools to the COVID-19 pandemic is unlikely to yield new insights, and could mislead policymakers at a critical moment.

Nationwide citizen science data show the importance of farmland outside protected areas for China’s avifauna. We urge the government of China to develop a national strategy for policy and research to protect biodiversity and traditional knowledge of sustainable agriculture to meet the post-2020 goal of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Homo sapiens remains, molecular data and a revised chronology for the Bulgarian site of Bacho Kiro document the earliest known presence of our species in Europe, representing an important jigsaw piece in the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition.

The postdoctoral experience is in need of reform. Here the authors outline concrete steps that institutions, postdocs and mentors can take to improve the landscape.

Bird species with a higher propensity towards innovative behaviours are at a lower risk of global extinction and are more likely to have increasing or stable populations than less innovative birds

A new radiocarbon chronology for the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition at the Bulgarian site of Bacho Kiro reveals Homo sapiens-associated sediments as early as 46,940 yr bp.

The loss of biodiversity at the global scale has been difficult to reconcile with observations of no net loss at local scales. Vegetation surveys across European temperate forests show that this may be explained by the replacement of small-ranged species with large-ranged ones, driven by nitrogen deposition.

In 355 coastal coral reef fish species, body size changed with warming, but the direction of a species’ body size response to warming through time was generally consistent with its response to temperature changes through space, rather than generally negative.

Modelling nonlinear habitat dynamics shows that delayed compensation of human impacts (‘no net loss’) will lead to biodiversity declines by the middle of the century. Instead, the authors recommend fixed targets (such as ‘zero loss’) as part of the post-2020 biodiversity framework.

Genomic comparisons with a new amphioxus chromosome-scale genome assembly reveal details of the early evolution of vertebrate genomes.

Analysis of transcripts in hybrids of two closely related sea urchins with divergent developmental gene expression suggests limited pleiotropic effects of mutations that contribute to divergence in gene expression.

A genome assembly of the sterlet, Acipenser ruthenus, reveals a whole-genome duplication early in the evolution of the entire sturgeon lineage and provides details about the rediploidization of the genome.

Flies with different numbers of Y chromosomes are used to show a potential link between de-repression of repetitive DNA and ageing.

Experimental evolution shows that host–plasmid coevolution in the presence of antibiotics promoted the emergence of multidrug resistance via two distinct conjugative plasmids in communities of Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae once antibiotics were removed.

A mathematical model that integrates biological and clinical data shows that the ecology of the stroma is an important determinant of tumour evolution in prostate cancer.