Volume 6 Issue 6, June 2022

Data on tropical forests are in high demand. But ground forest measurements are hard to sustain and the people who make them are extremely disadvantaged compared to those who use them. We propose a new approach to forest data that focuses on the needs of data originators, and ensures users and funders contribute properly.

Primate palaeontologist and passionate advocate for diversity in human origins research.

Researcher who studied fundamental questions about sexual selection, and an inspiring and kind colleague and friend.

A computational method that negates the need to directly measure species interactions provides evidence in support of classic theory, stating that microbial communities with higher diversity remain stable as long they have low complexity and weaker interactions.

Combining pantropical fish community surveys with bioenergetic models has revealed the global distribution of reef-fish ecosystem functions, and that trade-offs linked to demographic and trophic structure prevent any community from maximizing all functions simultaneously.

An analysis of phenotypic skew — the asymmetrical distributions of traits — explores how it can bias estimates of inheritance and selection, and how to correct for those biases.

Simultaneous evolution of vaccine-induced immune escape and virulence leads to different evolutionary end points, depending on the type of vaccine-induced protection.

Ocean afforestation is a proposed method for large-scale carbon dioxide removal, involving exporting rafts of nearshore macroalgae to the open ocean for long-term occupation and then sinking. In this Perspective, the authors caution that this approach has multiple potential ramifications for ocean chemistry and ecology.

Analysis of diet and body size in terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates shows that a U-shaped relationship between body size and trophic guild prevails across extant vertebrates with the exception of marine mammals and seabirds. Analysis of fossil data shows that, for terrestrial mammals, this pattern has persisted for at least 66 million years, despite anthropogenic perturbance, which may have greater effects in the next centuries.

After developing a method to infer network complexity without knowledge of underlying species interactions, the authors show that, in several types of microbial communities, an ecosystem’s stability constrains its complexity.

Integrating bioenergetic models and global coral reef fish community surveys, the authors show that there are functional trade-offs, meaning that no community can maximize all functions, and that dominant species underpin local functions, but their identity varies geographically.

A study in eastern Canada finds that forest-management strategies that lead to simplified forest structure and composition have resulted in loss of breeding habitat and associated population losses for many bird species.

Using 84 plant–hummingbird networks from across the Americas, the authors show that the balance between climate change-induced extinction, coextinction and colonization varies both with geography and network structure.

Exploring more than 17,000 privately protected areas in 15 countries across 5 continents, the authors identify the contribution of this kind of protected area to global conservation efforts and identify the roles they can play to achieving new biodiversity conservation targets.

Analysis of 48 newly generated genomes, including 32 mangrove species, sheds light on patterns of speciation and extinction of these woody, coastal plants.

Surveying sponge biodiversity across the Caribbean, the authors show that low microbial abundance is the ancestral symbiotic state, whereas high microbial abundance has evolved multiple times and exhibits increased endemism, metabolic dependence and chemical defences.

The role of compensatory mutations in phenotypic evolution is unclear. Here the authors use experimental evolution to show that gene loss followed by compensatory evolution contributes to the rapid emergence of new cellular and multicellular morphologies in the budding yeast.

Using data from blue tits, the authors show that the distribution of juvenile body size is skewed due to environmental factors, and that although it does not affect selection estimates in this case, skew has the potential to overestimate heritability and explain discrepancies in predicted trait evolution.

Modelling shows that vaccines that reduce infection or hasten infection clearance generate positive epistasis between vaccine-escape and virulence alleles, whereas vaccines that reduce virulence generate negative epistasis. High rates of recombination also affect how selection acts on both alleles.

After compiling literature data on mammal parasites across urban and non-urban areas, the authors show that mammals in urban areas have more parasites overall without disproportionately more zoonotic ones, as is commonly thought.

Excavation in Island New Guinea reveals features associated with the Pacific Lapita cultural complex as well as sustained local cultural traditions from 3,480–3,060 years ago, contemporary with the earliest known Lapita settlements 700 km away. This supports New Guinea as a springboard for Lapita dispersal throughout the Pacific and illuminates their origins.

Milk proteins from the North Caucasus and Eurasian steppe support the initial development of sheep dairying during the Eneolithic, followed by subsequent intensification and husbandry of different dairy animals during the Middle Bronze Age and later periods.