Volume 6 Issue 2, February 2022

Advances in spatial biodiversity science and nationally available data have enabled the development of indicators that report on biodiversity outcomes, account for uneven global biodiversity between countries, and provide direct planning support. We urge their inclusion in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

A macroecological view suggests some global drivers of language endangerment and continuity, but a focus on individual languages will be important to stem the tide of language loss.

Contrary to previous studies, an analysis of 7,000 plant and animal species shows that species size is unrelated to changes in their population abundance.

A landscape-level natural experiment in free-ranging pumas reveals how changes in hunting pressure alter viral evolution and infection dynamics through indirect effects on puma population size, demography and behaviour.

Combined mutation rate estimation and reverse ecology sheds light on the forces shaping population size of Prochlorococcus, a major bacterial carbon sink.

Despite expectations that global anthropogenic pressures on species with communities may be size biased, this relationship has not been tested on a large scale. Here the authors use existing databases to show that larger species have not experienced more declines in abundance within their respective communities than small species.

Analysing the global distribution, source and authorship of fossil research over the past 30 years, the authors find that researchers in high- or upper-middle-income countries hold a monopoly over palaeontological knowledge production, contributing to 97% of fossil data in the Paleobiology Database, leading to disenfranchisement of researchers in lower-income countries and biased spatial sampling across the globe.

New radiocarbon dates for the Mesolithic cemetery of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov suggest that the main use of the site spanned only a few centuries, centring on a northern hemisphere climatic downturn event.

Using a global analysis of 6,511 spoken languages with 51 predictor variables spanning aspects of population, documentation, legal recognition, education policy, socioeconomic indicators and environmental features, the authors identify predictors of current and future language endangerment and loss.

By conducting viral phylodynamic analysis on samples of puma feline immunodeficiency virus from regions with and without puma hunting, the authors show that stopping hunting disrupts male social structure and in turn influences viral dynamics.

Based on an empirically estimated mutation rate, the authors show that the effective population size of Prochlorococcus, the most abundant carbon-fixing organisms in the ocean, is smaller than that of many free-living bacteria, suggesting an important role of drift in Prochlorococcus evolution.

The hunchback spider exhibits male-specific polymorphism in head shape. Here, the authors show that this polymorphism is determined by a large insertion that comprises duplicated male-specific genes including a duplicate of a key sexual differentiation regulatory gene.

Tumour evolution modelling indicates that different tumour spatial structures can determine different tumour evolutionary modes, which are regulated by cell dispersal and cell–cell interactions. Model predictions of four evolutionary modes are consistent with empirical observations of cancers with varying architectures.

By integrating time series analyses of transcripts, lipids and metabolites, the authors show that microorganisms in the open ocean partition scarce resources temporally, with different microbial groups expressing nitrogen uptake and assimilation processes at different points throughout the diel cycle.