Volume 6 Issue 12, December 2022

Many academics move countries in pursuit of career opportunities. With every move, personal identities are renegotiated as people shift between belonging to majority and minority groups in different contexts. Institutes should consider people’s dynamic and intersectional identities in their diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

Over the past seventy-five years, long-term population studies of individual organisms in their natural environments have been influential in illuminating how ecological and evolutionary processes operate, and the extent of variation and temporal change in these processes. As these studies have matured, the incorporation of new technologies has generated an ever-broadening perspective, from molecular and genomic to landscape-level analyses facilitated by remote-sensing.

A global comparison of plant trait patterns calculated using citizen science observations versus those calculated using traditional scientific data reveals remarkable congruence between the two approaches.

Measurements of individual birds of 105 species across North America over almost twenty years reveal intraspecific trends of smaller body sizes towards the equator and of decreasing body size as average temperatures increase.

Plasmids are well known for transferring antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria. A study in the clinic shows that evolutionary dynamics within the gut microbiomes of hospitalized patients lead to rapid adaptive changes, balancing the level of resistance that plasmids provide against the fitness costs that they impose on bacteria.

This Perspective discusses potential effects of ocean warming on human nutrition provision from coral reef fish, ranging from altered species compositions of fish populations through to changed fish nutrient profiles resulting from altered metabolism, microbiome composition and trophic interactions.

Ecological syntheses are often assumed to identify generalities in effects, but this concept is rarely defined. Here, the authors review current practice in ecological synthesis and propose pathways to achieving generality.

Not all forest cover is of equal quality. Here, the authors ask whether forest cover or forest structural complexity influences extinction risk in tropical rainforest vertebrates, finding that forest structural conditions are more important than cover alone in terms of buffering species against extinction and population declines.

Comparing global vegetation trait patterns derived from citizen science data versus those from scientific survey plots, the authors reveal high correlations between the two approaches and improvements over previously published trait maps.

Analysis of a dataset of the morphology of more than 250,000 adult birds of 105 species over a 30 year period across North America reveals changes in body size and relative wing length over time and with relation to latitude, elevation and temperature variation.

Analysing a compilation of planktonic foraminifera assemblage time series covering the past 24,000 years, from the last ice age to the current warm period, the authors find that responses to warming were highly heterogeneous leading to the emergence of novel assemblages and possibly new ecological interactions.

There are many open questions about biogeochemical function in peatlands. Here, the authors investigate the nitrogen cycle of tropical peatlands, finding that a surprisingly high fraction of nitrous oxide production is abiotic and that denitrification is a coupled abiotic-biotic process.

Analysis of genomes in a phylogenetic context reveals a 350-million-year-old homomorphic sex chromosome in molluscs, probably maintained by regulation of reversible sex-biased genes and sex chromosome turnover.

Analysis of genomes, epigenomes and transcriptomes of developing sea urchins with divergent life histories shows how natural selection can reshape developmental gene regulatory networks.

Brachyury is an early mesoderm determinant and neural repressor in vertebrates. Comparative Brachyury target screens between a sea anemone and a sea urchin reveal an ancestral gene regulatory feedback loop involved in axial patterning, with conserved endodermal and neuronal, but not mesodermal, targets.

Analysis of the DNA methylomes of two ecomorphs of Astatotilapia calliptera from a single lake, which diverged about 1,000 years ago plus a third riverine ecomorph, from which they likely separated about 10,000 years ago, shows epigenetic differences associated with altered transcriptional activity of ecologically relevant genes, despite low levels of genetic divergence.

Multiple factors contribute to the independent evolution of the same adaptations in nature. This study quantifies parallel evolution among species of Timema stick insects and shows that the degree of parallelism is determined by shared ecology and genomic background.

The identification of 21 large inversion polymorphisms in populations of deer mice shows that they are widespread, important for patterns of recombination and likely to be involved in local adaptation.

A combination of analysis of plasmid diversity in the gut of hospitalized patients with experimental evolution shows that the evolution of plasmid-mediated antibiotic resistance involves a trade-off between antibiotic resistance levels and bacterial fitness.

A theoretical model of a community of species under selection for compatibility between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes predicts patterns of species diversity, abundance, speciation and extinction, and also suggests a link between metabolic demands and latitudinal variation in diversity.

Through analyses of ancient and modern human genomes, the authors show that previously reported Holocene-era admixture has masked more than 50 historic hard sweeps in modern European genomes.

Taphonomic and stable isotopic analysis of fish bone assemblages at the early Middle Pleistocene site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel suggest that fish were cooked before consumption by hominins.