Volume 4 Issue 8, 1 August 2020

Bat biologist and inspirational mentor who developed the concept of aeroecology.

Genomic regions conserved during evolution are important, but they have been ignored in conservation genetics. Managing deleterious mutations in such ultraconserved elements by genomics-informed conservation would make populations more resilient to future genetic drift.

Tree ring records show that sensitivity of conifer trees to drought has generally increased during the last century, but so has post-drought recovery.

Freshwaters are subject to a multitude of threats, but complex interactions among stressors are context-dependant and less common than expected.

This Perspective uses a social–ecological systems framework to make recommendations for global targets that capture the interdependencies of biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainable development to inform the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 process and the future of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

This Perspective discusses the microbial metacommunity of animal social groups, and the social and environmental forces that shape it at different levels, from individuals to species.

Developing theory to explore the effects of environmental change on the structure of species interactions within communities, the authors show that enhancing asymmetry in the structure can explain idiosyncratic responses to change. They further confirm these findings on experimental data from microbial species grown together compared with in isolation, subject to different temperature regimes.

Compiling a global geo-database of >30,000 range shifts, the authors show that marine species closely track shifting isotherms, whereas terrestrial species lag behind, probably due to wider thermal safety margins and movement constraints imposed by human activities.

A cross-scale analysis of paired-stressor effects on biological variables of European freshwater ecosystems shows that in 39% of cases, significant effects were limited to single stressors, with nutrient enrichment being the most important of these in lakes. Additive and interactive effects were similarly frequent (ca. 30% each), this frequency being independent of the spatial scale of analysis for lakes but increasing with scale for rivers.

Rising temperatures and predator avoidance constrain herbivore activity on the southern African savannas, forcing them into ever-tightening windows of activity, in a ‘timescape of fear’.

A study of global tree ring data records over the last century reveals a temporal trade-off between resistance and resilience to drought for gymnosperms.

Genome sequencing of multiple independent invading freshwater and native saline populations of a copepod reveals a positive association between balancing selection in the native range and parallel directional selection in the invading populations.

Using comparative population genomics across pinnipeds, this study explores how demographic change and life-history traits are correlated to the effective size of a population and conservation status.

Population genomic data from a global dataset of three-spined sticklebacks show that parallel signatures of marine to freshwater differentiation are less common than previously thought.

By assembling the genomes of 22 Fraxinus species and conducting comparisons including further species, the authors identify candidate loci for emerald ash borer resistance that have evolved convergently.

An analysis of geometric morphometric data from 148 species of salamanders shows how life cycle influences cranial shape diversity and rate of evolution.

A mathematical model of sexual conflict shows that kin discrimination and group dispersal inhibit harmful male behaviours at an individual level but kin discrimination intensifies sexual conflict at the population level.