Earth and environmental sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Marine aquaculture is widely proposed as compatible with ocean sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and human nutrition goals. In this Perspective, Belton and colleagues dispute the empirical validity of such claims and contend that the potential of marine aquaculture has been much exaggerated.

    • Ben Belton
    • , David C. Little
    •  & Shakuntala H. Thilsted

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Early studies of weather, seasonality, and environmental influences on COVID-19 have yielded inconsistent and confusing results. To provide policy-makers and the public with meaningful and actionable environmentally-informed COVID-19 risk estimates, the research community must meet robust methodological and communication standards.

    • Benjamin F. Zaitchik
    • , Neville Sweijd
    •  & Xavier Rodó

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Establishing diagnostics for terrestrial exoplanets are crucial for their characterization. Here, the authors show brightness modulations of Venus are caused by planetary-scale waves superimposed on the super-rotating winds can be used to detect existence of an atmosphere if detected at an exoplanet.

    • Y. J. Lee
    • , A. García Muñoz
    •  & S. Watanabe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The extraction of metals from seawater is an area of great potential; especially for the extraction of uranium. Here, the authors report on the synthesis of a DNA based uranium adsorbent with high selectivity and demonstrate the potential for the DNA based extraction of high-value soluble minerals from seawater.

    • Yihui Yuan
    • , Tingting Liu
    •  & Ning Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many climate models failed to reproduce the eastern Pacific cooling that has been linked to slower warming in the early 20th century. Here, the authors present a feedback mechanism between the tropical Pacific and the Atlantic which contributes to this bias as it further dampens the Pacific cooling response in models.

    • Chen Li
    • , Dietmar Dommenget
    •  & Shayne McGregor

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Marine microbial activities fuel biogeochemical cycles that impact the climate, but global models do not account for the myriad physiological processes that microbes perform. Here the authors argue for a model framework that reinterprets the ocean as physics coupled to biologically-driven redox chemistry.

    • Emily J. Zakem
    • , Martin F. Polz
    •  & Michael J. Follows

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Knowledge of shear-wave anisotropy is important to understanding the structure and dynamics of the subduction zone mantle wedge. Here, the authors find unambiguous evidence that forearc anisotropy resides in the upper-plate crust, while weak anisotropy in the most seaward part of the mantle wedge indicates decoupling from the slab

    • Naoki Uchida
    • , Junichi Nakajima
    •  & Youichi Asano

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rare earth elements are used in electronics, but increase in demand could lead to low supply. Here the authors conduct experiments on the International Space Station and show microbes can extract rare elements from rocks at low gravity, a finding that could extend mining potential to other planets.

    • Charles S. Cockell
    • , Rosa Santomartino
    •  & René Demets

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dust deposition brings iron that fuels ocean productivity, a connection impacting climate over geological time. Here the authors use sediment cores to show that in contrast to dynamics today, during the last glacial maximum westerly winds shuttled dust from Australia and South America around Antarctica and into the South Pacific.

    • Torben Struve
    • , Katharina Pahnke
    •  & Gisela Winckler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree mortality has been shown to be the dominant control on carbon storage in Amazon forests, but little is known of how and why Amazon forest trees die. Here the authors analyse a large Amazon-wide dataset, finding that fast-growing species face greater mortality risk, but that slower-growing individuals within a species are more likely to die, regardless of size.

    • Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert
    • , Oliver L. Phillips
    •  & David Galbraith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fish production is predicted to decrease with anthropogenic global warming. Here the authors analyse fish fossil assemblages from 62–46 My old deep-sea sediments and instead find a positive correlation between fish production and ocean temperature over geological timescales, which a data-constrained model explains in terms of trophic transfer efficiency and primary production.

    • Gregory L. Britten
    •  & Elizabeth C. Sibert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Classical epidemiological approaches have been limited in their ability to formally test hypotheses. Here, Dellicour et al. illustrate how phylodynamic and phylogeographic analyses can be leveraged for hypothesis testing in molecular epidemiology using West Nile virus in North America as an example.

    • Simon Dellicour
    • , Sebastian Lequime
    •  & Philippe Lemey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Correlations between tree species diversity and tree abundance are well established, but the direction of the relationship is unresolved. Here the authors use path models to estimate plausible causal pathways in the diversity-abundance relationship across 23 global forests regions, finding a lack of general support for a positive diversity-abundance relationship, which is prevalent in the most productive lands on Earth only

    • Jaime Madrigal-González
    • , Joaquín Calatayud
    •  & Markus Stoffel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study makes use of the total spread of zircon ages and trace elements to study the thermal evolution of magmatic systems. Applied to Nevado de Toluca, the authors determine the size of its subvolcanic magma reservoir and assess its potential of re-activation.

    • Gregor Weber
    • , Luca Caricchi
    •  & Axel K. Schmitt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The factors that determine whether pathogens co-occur in a host are poorly understood, especially for plant viruses. Here the authors conduct field experiments with the plant Plantago lanceolata and its viruses, showing that viral co-occurrences are driven predominantly by environmental context and host genotype rather than viral interactions.

    • Suvi Sallinen
    • , Anna Norberg
    •  & Anna-Liisa Laine

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fate of the carbon locked away in soil is uncertain, and there are vast differences between models. Here the authors apply observational, spatio-temporal constraints on carbon turnover projections and find that uncertainty in estimations of carbon dynamics are reduced by 50%.

    • Rebecca M. Varney
    • , Sarah E. Chadburn
    •  & Peter M. Cox

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global supply chain and demand for export goods can lead to relocated emissions. Goods produced in China for foreign markets have lead to an increase of domestic non-methane volatile organic compounds emissions by 3.5 million tons in 2013 resulting in potentially an estimated 16,889 premature deaths annually.

    • Jiamin Ou
    • , Zhijiong Huang
    •  & Dabo Guan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Solar insolation is not equally distributed on the Earth’s surface and such imbalances influence the atmospheric circulation. Here, the authors show that latitudinal insolation gradients synchronized the hydroclimate in the Northern mid-latitudes and the African and South American Monsoons throughout the Holocene.

    • Michael Deininger
    • , Frank McDermott
    •  & Denis Scholz

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Reducing soil degradation and improving soil management could make an important contribute to climate change mitigation. Here the authors discuss opportunities and challenges towards implementing a global climate mitigation strategy focused on carbon sequestration in agricultural soils, and propose a framework for guiding region- and soil-specific management options.

    • W. Amelung
    • , D. Bossio
    •  & A. Chabbi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The disintegration of cryosphere elements such as the Arctic summer sea ice, mountain glaciers, Greenland and West Antarctica is associated with temperature and radiative feedbacks. In this work, the authors quantify these feedbacks and find an additional global warming of 0.43°C.

    • Nico Wunderling
    • , Matteo Willeit
    •  & Ricarda Winkelmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relative importance of regional species pool and local assembly processes as drivers of beta diversity is unclear. Here the authors investigate soil bacterial diversity patterns along a 3700-km latitudinal gradient in Chinese forests, finding that community assembly processes differ based on environmental heterogeneity.

    • Xiao Zhang
    • , Shirong Liu
    •  & Jamie Schuler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (BD) associated with widespread amphibian declines is present in Europe but has not consistently caused disease-induced declines in that region. Here, the authors suggest that an endemic strain of BD with low virulence may protect the hosts upon co-infection with more virulent strains.

    • Mark S. Greener
    • , Elin Verbrugghe
    •  & An Martel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the El Niño Southern Oscillation depends on the background conditions is not well known. Here, the authors present individual foraminifera distributions which show that central Pacific variability is related to the warmth and depth of the thermocline across varying climate background conditions over the past ~285,000 years.

    • Gerald T. Rustic
    • , Pratigya J. Polissar
    •  & Sarah M. White

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eutrophication has been shown to weaken diversity-stability relationships in grasslands, but it is unclear whether the effect depends on scale. Analysing a globally distributed network of grassland sites, the authors show a positive role of beta diversity and spatial asynchrony as drivers of stability but find that nitrogen enrichment weakens the diversity-stability relationships at different spatial scales.

    • Yann Hautier
    • , Pengfei Zhang
    •  & Shaopeng Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Overflow water is an important part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, yet how it reaches the Greenland-Scotland Ridge is not fully known. Here, the authors show that the interior of the Greenland Sea gyre is the primary wintertime source of the densest portion of both Denmark Strait and Faroe Bank Channel overflows.

    • Jie Huang
    • , Robert S. Pickart
    •  & Fanghua Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dense water from the Nordic Seas sustains the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, yet the upstream pathways are not fully known. Here, the authors provide evidence of a deep current between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, which supplies 50% of the transport through the Faroe Bank Channel overflow.

    • Stefanie Semper
    • , Robert S. Pickart
    •  & Bogi Hansen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Urban development has dramatically increased in recent decades. Analyzing 841 large cities throughout the world for the period from 2001 to 2018, the authors disclosed uneven features of global urbanization in terms of urban expansion, population growth, and greening at different economic levels.

    • Liqun Sun
    • , Ji Chen
    •  & Dian Huang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phytoplankton are biogeochemically important but the drivers of their seasonal cycles in the Southern Ocean are poorly resolved. Here the authors use seven years of ARGO float data to measure bloom initiation, decline and termination throughout the Southern Ocean, finding that bloom dynamics are especially sensitive to the coupling between cell division rates and loss processes.

    • Lionel A. Arteaga
    • , Emmanuel Boss
    •  & Jorge L. Sarmiento

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High-latitude records show large diversity losses of marine plankton, such as radiolarians, with historical climate change. Here, Trubovitz et al. present a low-latitude record spanning the last 10 million years, finding that many high-latitude radiolarians did not shift equatorward but instead went extinct.

    • Sarah Trubovitz
    • , David Lazarus
    •  & Paula J. Noble

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many models assume a universal carbon use efficiency across forest biomes, in contrast to assumptions of other process-based models. Here the authors analyse forest production efficiency across a wide range of climates to show a positive relationship with annual temperature and precipitation, indicating that ecosystem models are overestimating forest carbon losses under warming.

    • A. Collalti
    • , A. Ibrom
    •  & I. C. Prentice

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chattering dust, or chemically reactive grains of sucrose containing pockets of pressurized carbon dioxide, are used in this experimental approach to study rock fractures. The chattering dust emits acoustic shocks that can be monitored and illuminates fracture geometry.

    • Laura J. Pyrak-Nolte
    • , William Braverman
    •  & David D. Nolte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Replacement of local crops with alternative varieties adapted to future conditions may improve food security under climate change. Here the authors apply landscape genomics and ensemble climate modelling to pearl millet in West Africa, supporting the potential of transfrontier assisted seed exchange.

    • Bénédicte Rhoné
    • , Dimitri Defrance
    •  & Yves Vigouroux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The abnormally low concentration of xenon compared to other noble gases in Earth’s atmosphere remains debated, as the identification of mantle minerals that can capture and stabilize xenon is challenging. Here, the authors propose that xenon iron oxides could be potential Xe hosts in Earth’s lower mantle.

    • Feng Peng
    • , Xianqi Song
    •  & Yanming Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate action from local actors is vital in achieving nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Here the authors show that existing commitments from U.S. states, cities and business could reduce emissions 25% below 2005 levels by 2030, with expanded subnational action reducing emissions by 37% and federal action by up to 49%.

    • Nathan E. Hultman
    • , Leon Clarke
    •  & John O’Neill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine records indicate a greenhouse to icehouse climate transition at ~34 million years ago, but how the climate changed within continental interiors at this time is less well known. Here, the authors show an orbital climate response shift with aridification on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau during this time.

    • Hong Ao
    • , Guillaume Dupont-Nivet
    •  & Zhisheng An

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China issued the Dual Credit policy to improve vehicle efficiency and accelerate new energy vehicle adoption. Here the authors show that the total Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) of the Chinese passenger vehicle fleet are expected to peak in 2032 and a significant reduction in GHG emissions is possible by optimizing the Dual Credit policy.

    • Xin He
    • , Shiqi Ou
    •  & Michael Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether or not species—when introduced to a new location—eventually become invasive has been linked to the specices’ capacity to expand its niche. However, here the authors show that the extent of niche shift is smaller in non-invasive than invasive ant species, questioning this established hypothesis.

    • Olivia K. Bates
    • , Sébastien Ollier
    •  & Cleo Bertelsmeier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Monsoon systems have strong impacts on precipitation and food security over large areas of the world. Here, the authors show that plant responses to rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere play a key role in modulating seasonal rainfall and water resources over global land monsoon regions.

    • Jiangpeng Cui
    • , Shilong Piao
    •  & Gabriel J. Kooperman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The COVID-19 pandemic has stopped many human activities, which has had significant impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. Here, the authors present daily estimates of country-level CO2 emissions for different economic sectors and show that there has been a 8.8% decrease in global CO2 emissions in the first half of 2020.

    • Zhu Liu
    • , Philippe Ciais
    •  & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

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