Volume 5 Issue 6, June 2021

Ocean conservation is needed within various and complex contexts. A nuanced understanding of this will bring better results for the global oceans, argues Dyhia Belhabib.

Four new Late Pleistocene European modern human genomes had Neanderthal ancestors in their immediate family history, suggesting that interbreeding with the last Neanderthals was common.

Combining detailed spatial maps of deforestation with international commodity trade patterns reveals that some countries’ consumption patterns play an outsized role in driving deforestation in others.

This Perspective outlines how financial levies on fisheries bycatch may aid biodiversity conservation both directly, by incentivizing bycatch prevention, and indirectly, through raising revenue that could be directed towards compensatory conservation.

The authors review wildlife protection laws in China and provide recommendations on how sentencing could be improved to incentivize compliance.

Despite the fact that large animals and microorganisms face different environmental and anthropogenic pressures, this study finds that marine biogeographic patterns are similar for organisms in different kingdoms.

A predictive model of soil microbiome composition is tested against community surveys from across the United States, showing an increase in predictability with spatial scale when using both functional and taxonomic groups.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

A phylogenetic meta-analysis of patterns and drivers of body size evolution across a global sample of paired island–mainland populations of terrestrial vertebrates shows that ‘island rule’ effects are widespread in mammals, birds and reptiles, but less evident in amphibians, which mostly tend towards gigantism.

Flexibility in interaction patterns could help species adapt to global change. Here the authors show that pollinators with higher interaction flexibility are more likely to colonize new patches in a landscape.

The genomes of 609 wild Caenorhabditis elegans strains isolated across the world reveal hyper-divergent regions, often shared among many wild strains, that are enriched for genes that mediate environmental response, which might have enabled the species to thrive in diverse environments.

The authors apply a Bayesian total evidence dating approach to a recent hominin phylogeny, estimating that the origin of Homo probably occurred 4.3–2.56 million years ago. Ancestral state reconstructions show the onset of a trend towards greater body mass with the origin of the genus and gradual but accelerating encephalization rates throughout hominin evolution.

The authors present the genome sequence of a >45,000-year-old female Homo sapiens individual from the site of Zlatý kůň, Czechia. Although radiometric dating of the human remains was inconclusive, the authors were able to use molecular methods to demonstrate that she was probably among the earliest Eurasian inhabitants following expansion out of Africa.

Adaptive therapies based on evolutionary principles propose that, under certain conditions, tumour containment, rather than elimination, might be the best strategy to treat cancer. This study presents a theoretical analysis of different models of tumour containment.

The species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric quantifies the contributions that abating threats and restoring habitats offer towards reducing species’ extinction risk in specific places.

The authors use economic input–output modelling to reveal how consumption patterns contribute to deforestation domestically and internationally across nations.

A global assessment of the status of tropical cloud forests shows that they have declined overall by ~2.4% since 2001, with much of this occurring despite formal protection and with up to 8% loss in some regions.