Volume 5 Issue 2, February 2021

The study of environmental DNA can reveal information about the history and presence of Indigenous communities on their lands — potentially even inadvertently. Better engagement with the ethical aspects of environmental DNA research is required in the field as a whole, and especially for researchers working on Indigenous lands.

In African wildlife conservation literature, southern and southeastern African voices dominate, giving a false impression of pan-Africanism. We present divergent perspectives from West, Central and the Horn of Africa and argue that empathy towards multiple perspectives offers increased resilience to COVID-19 and other crises.

The quantity of UVA/deep violet light varies seasonally and affects locomotor activity in a marine annelid, providing cues for phenology in addition to those provided by change in photoperiod.

Five key criteria are proposed to demonstrate robustly that temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony will negatively impact consumers, which the authors show are rarely met in the current literature.

By subjecting chlorophyte lipid extracts to pyrolysis, the authors demonstrate that the lipid biomarkers 24-isopropylcholestane and 24-n-propylcholestane can be generated from algal C₂₉ sterol in experiments simulating diagenetic processes, thereby undermining their status as sponge biomarkers.

Via congruent observations in geological samples and pyrolysis experiments, the authors demonstrate that 26-alkylsteranes posited as sponge biomarkers can form during diagenesis of common algal sterols.

Using demographic data for 1,111 tree species across ten tropical forests, the authors test the generality of the growth–mortality trade-off, finding that it holds in undisturbed but not disturbed forests.

Based on a global-scale analysis of the leaf elemental composition of tree species, the authors show that shared ancestry is the major factor shaping plant elementomes, thus providing large-scale empirical support for the biogeochemical niche hypothesis.

Analysing data from thousands of microbial communities, the authors show that these communities cluster at different ends of the spectrum between resource competition and metabolic cooperation. Cooperative communities tend to have smaller genomes and multiple auxotrophies, whereas competitive communities have larger genomes, overlapping niches and a high potential for antimicrobial activity.

The intensity of UVA light, in addition to the photoperiod, is shown to determine seasonal change in the marine mass spawning annelid Platynereis dumerilii.

The future challenges and potential opportunities of robotics and autonomous systems in urban ecosystems, and how they may impact biodiversity, are explored and prioritized via a global horizon scan of 170 experts.

This study reports the genome of the miniature segmented annelid Dimorphilus gyrociliatus and reveals no drastic changes in genome architecture and regulation, unlike other cases of genome miniaturization.

In this study, the authors generate transcriptomic data for 6 organs in 74 cichlid fish species from African Lake Tanganyika to understand the dynamics of gene expression associated with rapid phenotypic evolution.

Using data from four adaptive radiations of the three-spined stickleback, the authors examine levels of genomic parallelism and the phenotypic and environmental factors that predict parallelism.