Biogeography articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effect of biogeographic isolation on biodiversity remains unclear. Assessing global mammal and bird assemblages, the authors show that long-term biogeographic barriers explain reduced species richness and divergent ecological function, while environment determines diversity in most of the world.

    • Peter J. Williams
    • , Elise F. Zipkin
    •  & Jedediah F. Brodie

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global biogeographic patterns have resulted from millions of years of evolution. Here, the authors show that the global dispersal of non-native ant species is rapidly redefining these biogeographic patterns by homogenizing species assemblages, disproportionally affecting tropical regions and islands.

    • Lucie Aulus-Giacosa
    • , Sébastien Ollier
    •  & Cleo Bertelsmeier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Tibetan Plateau is the largest plateau in the world and hosts a variety of aquatic ecosystems. Here, the authors present a gene and genome catalogue of Tibetan Plateau aquatic microbiomes, greatly expanding known taxonomic and functional diversity for the region and giving insights into its microbial biogeography.

    • Mingyue Cheng
    • , Shuai Luo
    •  & Kang Ning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that habitat connectivity can increase resilience to ecosystem regime shifts. The authors used >7,000 fish samplings from the Baltic Sea to study a spatially propagating shift from an ecosystem dominated by predatory fish to one dominated by their prey, also finding that fish-eating seals and cormorants increased the risk of a shift.

    • Agnes B. Olin
    • , Ulf Bergström
    •  & Johan S. Eklöf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using a dataset that included 341,846 species in 391 angiosperm floras worldwide, this study finds that the global phylogenetic structure of angiosperms shows clear and meaningful relationships with environmental factors and that current climatic variables have the highest predictive power for phylogenetic metrics reflecting recent evolutionary relationships.

    • Hong Qian
    • , Shenhua Qian
    •  & Michael Kessler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree species may be vulnerable to multiple global change factors. Here, the authors find that more than 17 thousand tree species are exposed to increasing anthropogenic threats, including many species classified as data-deficient in the IUCN Red List.

    • Coline C. F. Boonman
    • , Josep M. Serra-Diaz
    •  & Jens-Christian Svenning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Body colour may be an important factor in insect phenology. Here, the authors show that colour lightness of dragonfly assemblages from the UK, collected between May and October from 1990-2020, varies in response to seasonal changes in solar radiation, suggesting a link between colour-based thermoregulation and insect phenology.

    • Roberto Novella-Fernandez
    • , Roland Brandl
    •  & Christian Hof

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mechanisms generating montane biodiversity remain incompletely understood. Here, the authors study the passerine avifauna of Indo-Pacific island mountains, finding that Eurasian-origin species colonized directly from other mountains, while Australo-Papuan-origin species made upslope range shifts from the lowlands.

    • Andrew Hart Reeve
    • , Jonathan David Kennedy
    •  & Knud Andreas Jønsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study relates 88,000 elevation range sizes of vascular plants in 44 mountains to short-term and long-term temperature variation. The authors finding of decreasing elevation range sizes with greater diurnal temperature range supports a novel biodiversity hypothesis and indicates increased extinction risk of continental species.

    • Arnaud Gallou
    • , Alistair S. Jump
    •  & John-Arvid Grytnes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Scleractinian corals are important in both shallow and deep ecosystems. Here, the authors use global spatial distribution data with a phylogenetic approach to examine directionality and speed of colonization during depth diversification, finding an offshore-onshore pattern of evolution and that depth dispersion is associated with phenotypic innovations.

    • Ana N. Campoy
    • , Marcelo M. Rivadeneira
    •  & Chris Venditti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Bacterial functional diversity does not necessarily correlate with taxonomic diversity because average genome size may vary by community. Here, Wang et al. investigate bacterial communities along a natural pH gradient in forest soils, and find that average genome size and functional diversity decrease, whereas taxonomic diversity increases, as soil pH rises from acid to neutral.

    • Cong Wang
    • , Qing-Yi Yu
    •  & Cheng Gao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors report two fossil lampreys, jawless vertebrates, from the Middle-Late Jurassic fossil Lagerstätte Yanliao Biota of North China. These large lampreys have an extensively toothed feeding apparatus resembling the Southern Hemisphere pouched lamprey, suggesting an ancestral predatory habit and southern origin of living lampreys.

    • Feixiang Wu
    • , Philippe Janvier
    •  & Chi Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Explosive volcanic eruptions cause abrupt global cooling as happened after the 1809 and 1815 Tambora eruptions. Here, the authors show how forest growth was severely impacted by such cold extremes in high latitudes and elevations and that recovery took longer in mid-latitude regions.

    • Shan Gao
    • , J. Julio Camarero
    •  & Eryuan Liang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relationship between stomatal traits and environmental drivers across plant communities has important implications for ecosystem fluxes. Here, the authors explore community-scale stomatal trait-environment relationships, which are important for predicting future water and carbon cycles.

    • Congcong Liu
    • , Lawren Sack
    •  & Guirui Yu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phytopathogenic fungi threaten global food security but their global diversity and biogeography are underexplored. Using more than 20,000 globally distributed samples, this study builds a global atlas of phytopathogenic fungi, and predicts that that their diversity and invasion potential will increase globally by the end of this century, especially in forest and cropland ecosystems.

    • Pengfa Li
    • , Leho Tedersoo
    •  & Jiandong Jiang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study investigated how ecological mechanisms and large-scale oceanic current systems shape prokaryotic microbial community patterns. They show that prokaryotic communities in the upper 200 m of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, the southern Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea have a modular structure of co-occurring taxa with similar environmental preferences.

    • Felix Milke
    • , Jens Meyerjürgens
    •  & Meinhard Simon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mangroves provide ecosystem services but are threatened by anthropogenic activities. This study identifies priority areas that maximise the protection of mangrove biodiversity and ecosystem services. The authors show that biodiversity can be protected whilst maximising ecosystem benefits, with little or no increase in the protected area required.

    • Alvise Dabalà
    • , Farid Dahdouh-Guebas
    •  & Anthony J. Richardson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Do species with large ranges diversify faster? While there have been some studies suggesting the opposite pattern, this study indicates that large-ranged mammals indeed diversify faster in general, but that there are important geographic domains deviating from this pattern.

    • Jan Smyčka
    • , Anna Toszogyova
    •  & David Storch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine bivalves are important components of ecosystems and are exploited for food across the world. This study expands the list of marine bivalves known to be exploited worldwide and then uses a trait-based approach to identify intrinsically vulnerable species and to pinpoint regions with high levels of extinction-prone exploited species, helping to prioritize areas for conservation effort.

    • Shan Huang
    • , Stewart M. Edie
    •  & David Jablonski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Arctic tundra is a relatively young biome. Here, the authors sample 32 angiosperm clades encompassing 3600+ species and find that both long-term dispersal and in situ speciation may have contributed to Arctic flora assembly, in association with landscape, climate and sea-level changes since the early Late Miocene.

    • Jun Zhang
    • , Xiao-Qian Li
    •  & Wei Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Functional trait data could guide predictions of species responses to environmental change. Here, the authors show that winner and loser shrub species in the warming tundra biome overlap in trait space and may therefore be difficult to predict based on commonly measured traits.

    • Mariana García Criado
    • , Isla H. Myers-Smith
    •  & Anna-Maria Virkkala

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree growth in boreal forests is generally predicted to increase under warming. Here, the authors demonstrate a method to analyze physiologically informed temperature series of tree-ring data, finding potentially overlooked growth-temperature responses and projecting increasing risks of warming to boreal larch forests.

    • Wenqing Li
    • , Rubén D. Manzanedo
    •  & Neil Pederson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study updates the floristic realms of the world by integrating global distributions and mega-phylogenies of 12,664 angiosperm genera. Eight realms and 16 sub-realms are identified, most of which have formed since the Paleogene, and their formation is dominated by geographic isolation induced by plate tectonics rather than current or historical climate.

    • Yunpeng Liu
    • , Xiaoting Xu
    •  & Zhiheng Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This work explains how the spatial structuring of populations, focusing on the globally dominant phytoplankton Prochlorococcus, can lead to erroneous statistical predictions for changes in plankton abundance as the ocean warms. Conflicting predictions of dynamical and statistical models for this biogeochemically critical species are resolved.

    • Vincent Bian
    • , Merrick Cai
    •  & Christopher L. Follett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Land-use diversity can theoretically have a significant impact on biodiversity at large spatial scales but the importance and generality of this environmental component are uncertain. This study shows that regional land-use diversity constitutes a key factor associated with bird regional taxonomic and functional richness worldwide.

    • Carlos Martínez-Núñez
    • , Ricardo Martínez-Prentice
    •  & Vicente García-Navas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The interplay of migration and adaptation was key in shaping species’ responses to Quaternary climate change. Illustrating this, Luqman et al. show that adaptive responses in a plant species emerged from climate-induced range shifts due to heterogenous sieving of adaptive alleles across space and time.

    • Hirzi Luqman
    • , Daniel Wegmann
    •  & Alex Widmer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this disease mapping study, the authors estimate disability-adjusted life year rates for three of the major causes of mortality for children under five 43 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They identify significant heterogeneity at the subnational level, highlighting the need for a targeted intervention approach.

    • Robert C. Reiner Jr.
    • , Catherine A. Welgan
    •  & Simon I. Hay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deglacial forest expansion in the Northern Hemisphere poses a conundrum: Model results agree with the climate signal but are several millennia ahead of reconstructed forest dynamics. The underlying causes remain unsolved.

    • Anne Dallmeyer
    • , Thomas Kleinen
    •  & Ulrike Herzschuh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study uses a compilation of 58 population genetic studies of 47 phylogenetically divergent marine sedentary species over the Mediterranean basin to assess how genetic differentiation is predicted by different dispersal models. Multi-generation dispersal models reveal implicit links among siblings from a common ancestor (coalescent connectivity) that could improve spatial conservation planning.

    • Térence Legrand
    • , Anne Chenuil
    •  & Vincent Rossi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Accurate estimates of carbon fluxes are important to our understanding of the carbon cycle. Here, via model-data integration, the authors disentangle anthropogenic and environmental carbon flux contributions of terrestrial woody vegetation, and find that environmental processes are weaker and more susceptible to interannual variations and extreme events in the 21st century than previously estimated.

    • Selma Bultan
    • , Julia E. M. S. Nabel
    •  & Julia Pongratz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors use climate and resource availability, to statistically model the limiting factors in the dynamics of hunter-gatherer population densities in Europe between 21,000 and 8,000 years ago. They find that limiting factors varied spatiotemporally and the effects of these may be visible in the archaeological record.

    • Alejandro Ordonez
    •  & Felix Riede

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil microbial carbon is central to soil functions and services, but its spatial-temporal dynamics are unclear. Here the authors show global trends in soil microbial carbon, which suggests a global decrease in soil microbial carbon, mostly driven by temperature increases in northern areas.

    • Guillaume Patoine
    • , Nico Eisenhauer
    •  & Carlos A. Guerra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes are intimately linked with the fate of organic matter. Here the authors develop an ecological network framework and show how microbes and dissolved organic matter interact along global change drivers of temperature and nutrient enrichment via manipulative field experiments on mountains.

    • Ang Hu
    • , Mira Choi
    •  & Jianjun Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding patterns in woody plant trait relationships and trade-offs is challenging. Here, by applying machine learning and data imputation methods to a global database of georeferenced trait measurements, the authors unravel key relationships in tree functional traits at the global scale.

    • Daniel S. Maynard
    • , Lalasia Bialic-Murphy
    •  & Thomas W. Crowther

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global diversity trends in the fossil record vary regionally through time and space, affecting our ability to interpret macroevolutionary history. Here, the authors propose a method to eliminate spatial sampling bias, estimate origination and extinction rates, and generate diversity estimates, applying this method to the Late Permian to Early Jurassic marine fossil record.

    • Joseph T. Flannery-Sutherland
    • , Daniele Silvestro
    •  & Michael J. Benton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors use full-plastome phylogenomics and multiclade comparative models to reconstruct the tempo and drivers of six European Alpine angiosperm lineages before and during the Pleistocene. They find that geographic divergence and bedrock shifts drive speciation events, while diversification rates remained steady.

    • Jan Smyčka
    • , Cristina Roquet
    •  & Sébastien Lavergne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using a field experiment, this study shows that both lowland and alpine plant species experience greater competitive effects and a reduced ability to coexist towards their elevation range edges due to increased niche overlap and competitive inequality. These findings suggest competition helps set both lower and upper elevation range limits.

    • Shengman Lyu
    •  & Jake M. Alexander

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The biogeography of viral communities in extreme environments remains understudied. Here, the authors use metagenomic sequencing on 90 acid mine drainage sediments sampled across Southern China, showing the predominant effects of prokaryotic communities and the influence of environmental variables on viral taxonomy and function.

    • Shaoming Gao
    • , David Paez-Espino
    •  & Linan Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quaternary climatic oscillations had a large impact on European biogeography. Using genomic data, machine learning, and approximate Bayesian computation, this study outlines a general scenario in which Quaternary climatic oscillations shaped the evolution of European steppe biota in a congruent way, emphasizing the role of climate underlying patterns of genetic variance at the biome level.

    • Philipp Kirschner
    • , Manolo F. Perez
    •  & Peter Schönswetter

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