Volume 5 Issue 10, October 2021

Global priority maps have been transformative for conservation, but now have questionable utility and may crowd out other forms of research. Conservation must re-engage with contextually rich knowledge that builds global understanding from the ground up.

Global spatial information on biodiversity, carbon storage and land-use abound. Yet maps are conspicuously absent from national climate and biodiversity strategies, hampering integrated approaches to meeting economic, social and environmental objectives, including those under the forthcoming Global Biodiversity Framework.

Pioneer of molecular evolution.

Insects across the globe are facing multiple anthropogenic pressures. A study combining several data streams and advanced modelling helps to unravel the main factors underlying declines in monarch butterfly populations.

An international team of authors present a horizon scan of the predominant causes and consequences of pollinator loss, revealing that perceptions of the risks of losing pollinators vary substantially among regions.

Sustaining ecosystems is essential for biodiversity conservation and human well-being. This Perspective synthesizes the scientific basis for an effective goal for ecosystem conservation, and associated indicators of progress, that can be applied from global to local scales.

This Perspective explores the ways in which evolutionary processes can be considered when using species distribution models to predict responses to climate change.

By surveying ~5,000 citizens across five Asian countries/territories, the authors show that increased awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic reduced self-reported propensity to consume wildlife products. A behavioural intervention simulation also suggests that increasing awareness of zoonotic risks could reduce future wildlife consumption.

Arabidopsis suecica is a natural allotetraploid species formed via hybridization of Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis arenosa. Comparative analysis of genome and transcriptome data shows no evidence for major genomic changes linked to structural and functional alterations in A. suecica but reveals changes to the meiotic machinery and cyto-nuclear processes.

Arabidopsis suecica is an allotetraploid derived from Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis arenosa. Analysis of resynthesized and natural allotetraploid A. suecica shows balanced genomic variation accompanied by convergent and concerted changes in DNA methylation and gene expression between two subgenomes that probably contributed to genome stability during polyploid evolution.

Experimental evolution shows that sexually antagonistic selection promotes sexual body size dimorphism in the seed beetle. Dimorphism is largely explained by Y-linked genetic variance with contribution from sex-specific dominance, X-linkage and sex differences in autosomal variance.

The authors use Bayesian morphological clock modelling and combined trace and body fossil data to examine the evolutionary dynamics of early tetrapodomorphs.

Dogs exhibit remarkable variation in colour patterns. Here, the authors identify structural variants of independent regulatory modules for ventral and hair cycle expression of the ASIP gene that explain five distinctive dog colour patterns and trace back the origin of one colour pattern to an extinct canid.

The authors conduct experiments with soil microbes grown in communities with increasing numbers of available carbon sources, each of which can support variable numbers of species. The results show that each additional resource enables only one to two additional species to grow, lower than expectations.

Collective movements such as flocking or schooling can benefit a single species, but there may also be wider implications of such behaviour. The authors use a theoretical model to show that collective movement of consumer species can promote species coexistence and ecosystem stability.

A collation of data on North American monarch butterfly summer breeding and overwintering populations from 1994 to 2018, combined with seasonal covariate data, suggests an increasing role of climate change as a driver of butterfly dynamics.

The predominant threats to pollinators vary across locations, as do perceptions of the consequences of pollinator loss. Here, the authors use formal expert elicitation methods to identify how pollination conservation experts rank the various drivers of pollinator decline and the range of risks to humans if pollination activity is lost.