Volume 7 Issue 5, May 2023

The international commitment to protect 30% of the world’s surface by 2030 is laudable and necessary, but scientists must now work with governments and other groups to ensure success in its implementation and evaluation, by using inclusive and evidence-led approaches, argues Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and author of The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity.

Projecting and managing the feedback between tropical deforestation and global Earth system dynamics, and identifying potential critical thresholds or tipping points, will be key to our species’ future on this planet. By understanding the major historical processes that underpin the origins of this interaction, and bringing natural and social systems together in interdisciplinary models, we can evaluate the degree to which past human impacts on tropical forests resulted in observable planetary ramifications that have left legacies for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Seminar series are a key part of academic culture. We present practices that are aimed at increasing the diversity of seminar speakers, and thus broadening associated opportunities to more members of the ecology and evolutionary biology research community.

The US government has launched a national nature assessment, to be completed by 2026. This assessment is designed to take stock of changes in the country’s lands, waters, biodiversity, ecosystems and the benefits they provide. We spoke to Heather Tallis about the aims of the project, and how individuals can contribute to its development. Heather is the Acting Director of the assessment for the US Global Change Research Program, as well as the Assistant Director for Biodiversity and Conservation Sciences in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Ecosystem ecologist who made fundamental contributions to carbon cycle science and advocated for the next generation of scientists

Unlike other North Pacific killer whales, Southern Resident killer whales have failed to thrive despite decades of conservation. Genomics combined with long-term observational records reveal inbreeding depression as a compelling explanation.

For a long time, the ecological niche concept was less popular for microbes than for other organisms. A new proxy for the ecological niche breadth of a microorganism, based on the variability of the communities with which it associates, enables investigation of the correlates of being a social generalist or social specialist.

Ensemble quotient optimization (EQO) uses patterns of variation in species abundance and ecosystem functions across microbial communities to identify microbial guilds in a systematic, objective manner. EQO is robust in recovering functional groups in soil, ocean and animal-gut microbial communities.

In cyanobacteria, the interaction between an orange carotenoid protein and its allosteric regulator evolved when a horizontal gene transfer event first brought the two proteins together. However, the surface compatibility between the proteins had already emerged. This finding implies that specific protein–protein interactions can evolve without the action of direct natural selection.

An analysis of the eligibility rules, assessment criteria and potential gender bias in best researcher and best paper awards from broad-scope ecology and evolution journals and societies shows a lack of assessment transparency, few attempts to foster equitable access and minimal consideration of open science.

The authors report a highly diverse Middle Ordovician Burgess Shale-type fauna from Wales (UK) that compares with the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang biotas in palaeoenvironment and preservational style.

Genomic and demographic analyses of the ‘Southern Resident’ killer whales in the North Pacific find that strong inbreeding depression is inhibiting growth of this small and isolated population. The findings help to explain why this group of whales is still declining despite 50 years of conservation efforts.

Analysing plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the authors identify three times more coastal invertebrate taxa than pelagic taxa, along with evidence that coastal taxa are reproducing while rafting on plastic.

Consuming microplastics is known to harm marine wildlife in several ways, but effects on the microbiome are understudied. Here the authors demonstrate that two species of wild seabirds with larger amounts of microplastic in their guts had fewer commensal gut microbial species but more pathogens.

Interest in private financing of restoration is growing, but funding remains low. Semi-structured interviews with financial actors and restoration finance experts show that there are some market incentives for private actors to finance restoration, but policy mandates are needed to scale private finance and ensure it is steered towards ecologically sound and equitable objectives

An unsupervised, annotation-free method is developed that can identify microbial functional groups on the basis of variation in microbiome data and environmental variables. Here, the authors demonstrate its application in several different datasets including the Tara oceans microbiome and animal gut microbiomes.

In microbial community assembly, species that establish earlier often have an advantage. Here, the authors explore these priority effects in the tomato plant-associated microbiome, showing that experimental evolution selecting for host colonization alters priority effects among competitors.

The iron/manganese superoxide dismutases constitute a family of metalloenzymes that function as scavengers of reactive oxygen species. Here the authors use phylogenetics, biochemistry and structural biology to show how differential metal preference for Fe and Mn has been modulated throughout iron/manganese superoxide dismutases evolution.

Replacing 86 essential genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae with orthologues from species with different diverging times, the authors show that intermolecular epistasis plays a key role in their evolution and that conserved physiological functions are maintained by co-evolution of interacting components.

Molecular phylogenetics, ancestral sequence reconstruction and biophysical protein characterization are used to investigate the interaction between the orange carotenoid protein and its unrelated regulator, the fluorescence recovery protein (FRP). This interaction evolved when a precursor of FRP was horizontally acquired by cyanobacteria.

Defining the niche of a microorganism is more difficult than doing so for a macroorganism. Here the authors define a microorganism’s niche based on the communities of other microorganisms it is found with; they apply this social niche breadth metric to reveal the ecological and genomic correlates of microbial specialism versus generalism.