Ecology

Warmer spring temperatures affect the timing of stem diameter growth of temperate deciduous trees but have little effect on annual growth.

A boreal conifer is advancing northwards into Arctic tundra, with this treeline advance facilitated by climate warming together with winter winds, deeper snow and increased soil nutrient availability.

The survival of southern boreal tree saplings decreases in response to even modest warming and reduced rainfall, which,together with species-specific growth responses, could lead to regeneration failure of currently dominant tree species.

Nutrient manipulation of low-phosphorus soil in an old growth Amazon rainforest shows that phosphorus availability drives forest productivity and is likely to limit the response to increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.

Competition for pollinators weakens plant coexistence by destabilizing interactions between plant species; this is crucial for determining the effects of the decline in pollinators.

The diversity hotspots hypothesis attributes the overall increase in global diversity during the Late Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras to the development of diversity hotspots under prolonged conditions of Earth system stability and maximum continental fragmentation.

DNA from ancient wolves spanning 100,000 years sheds light on wolves’ evolutionary history and the genomic origin of dogs.

Mesocosm experiments in different biomes show that future ocean acidification will slow down the dissolution of biogenic silica, decreasing silicic acid availability in the surface ocean and triggering a global decline of diatoms as revealed by Earth system model simulations.

Over the past 35 years, annual tree mortality risk has increased in the moist tropical forests of Australia and is associated with increased atmospheric water stress.

Changes in climate and land use will lead to species aggregating in new combinations at high elevations, in biodiversity hotspots and in areas of high human population density in Asia and Africa, driving the cross-species transmission of animal-associated viruses.

An extinction-risk assessment of reptiles shows that at least 21.1% of species are threatened by factors such as agriculture, logging, urban development and invasive species, and that efforts to protect birds, mammals and amphibians probably also benefit many reptiles.

Sustainable mariculture could increase seafood production under almost all climate-change scenarios analysed, but this would require substantial fisheries reforms, continued advances in feed technology and the establishment of effective mariculture governance and best practices.

Using a combined before–after control–impact approach shows that existing studies using either before–after or control–intervention methods incorrectly estimate the effectiveness of protected areas in maintaining waterbird populations.

Interaction between climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions in insect abundance and species richness, which can be mitigated by nearby natural habitats in low-intensity agricultural settings.

In situ experiments have demonstrated chemotaxis of marine bacteria and archaea towards specific phytoplankton-derived dissolved organic matter, which leads to microscale partitioning of biogeochemical transformation in the ocean.

In extinct species including non-avian dinosaurs, bone density is shown to be a reliable indicator of aquatic behavioural adaptations, which emerged in spinosaurids during the Early Cretaceous.

A direct estimate is provided of the whole-ecosystem carbon response to fire suppression in a mesic African savanna, showing limited increase in carbon storage despite a large increase in tree cover.

A bacterial enzyme is characterized and demonstrated to have Ni²⁺-dependent activity and high specificity for free guanidine enabling the bacteria to use guanidine as the sole nitrogen source for growth.

Methicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus appeared in European hedgehogs in the pre-antibiotic era as a co-evolutionary adaptation to antibiotic-producing dermatophytes and have spread within the local hedgehog populations and between hedgehogs and secondary hosts.

More than one-third of wild deer tested in northeast Ohio showed evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection of human origin.

In a 15-year whole-ecosystem, single-factor experiment, stopping experimental mercury loading results in rapid decreases in methylmercury contamination of fish populations and almost complete recovery within the timeframe of the study.

High-temperature, high-acidity and low-oxygen extremes may pose a particular threat to marine ecosystems, requiring a major effort to understand them and the ability of marine life to respond to them.

A survey of species-level genes from 13,174 publicly available metagenomes shows that most species-level genes are specific to a single habitat, encode a small number of protein families and are under low positive (adaptive) pressure.

An emergent constraint combining biosphere models and carbon budget estimates suggests that the increase in the global terrestrial carbon sink is caused largely by a CO₂-induced increase in photosynthesis.

A combination of 3D whale locations and acoustic measurements of prey density is used here to show that whales’ consumption of krill is several times larger than often thought.

The N₂-fixing symbiont ‘Candidatus Celerinatantimonas neptuna’ lives inside the root tissue of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica, providing ammonia and amino acids to its host in exchange for sugars and enabling highly productive seagrass meadows to thrive in the nitrogen-limited Mediterranean Sea.

A large-scale metagenomic analysis of plant and mammal environmental DNA reveals complex ecological changes across the circumpolar region over the past 50,000 years, as biota responded to changing climates, culminating in the postglacial extinction of large mammals and emergence of modern ecosystems.

Global inverse modelling of plant water acquisition depth and isotope-based plant water use estimates demonstrate globally prevalent use of precipitation from distant sources, and that water-stressed ecosystems are well suited to using past and remote precipitation.

The authors analyse the coordination and trade-off of the aboveground and fine-root traits of vascular plants using global trait databases.

Three key axes of variation of ecosystem functional changes and their underlying causes are identified from a dataset of surface gas exchange measurements across major terrestrial biomes and climate zones.

Oceanic deposition of wildfire aerosols can enhance marine productivity, as supported here by satellite and in situ profiling floats data showing that emissions from the 2019–2020 Australian wildfires fuelled phytoplankton blooms in the Southern Ocean.

The authors show that plant–pollinator interactions confer a fitness advantage to rare plant species in a biodiversity hotspot.

Woody plants across the continental United States make extensive use of water stored in bedrock across diverse climates and biomes.

Multi-year field experiments across six continents suggest that insects have an important contribution to decomposition and carbon release from forest deadwood.

Remote-sensing estimates of fires and the estimated geographic ranges of thousands of plant and vertebrate species in the Amazon Basin reveal that fires have impacted the ranges of 77–85% of threatened species over the past two decades.