Ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are gaps in international efforts to monitor the wildlife trade, with many species potentially being undetected by the established monitoring groups. Here the authors use an automated web search to document the sale of reptiles online, revealing over 36% of all known reptile species are in trade, including many missing from official databases.

    • Benjamin M. Marshall
    • , Colin Strine
    •  & Alice C. Hughes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanisms and consequences of the acclimation of soil respiration to warming are unclear. Here, the authors combine soil respiration, metagenomics, and functional gene results from a 7-year grassland warming experiment to a microbial-enzyme decomposition model, showing functional gene information to lower uncertainty and improve fit.

    • Xue Guo
    • , Qun Gao
    •  & Jizhong Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dryness stresses vegetation and can lead to declines in productivity, increased emission of carbon, and plant mortality, but the drivers of this stress remain unclear. Here the authors show that soil moisture plays a dominant role relative to atmospheric water demand over most global land vegetated areas.

    • Laibao Liu
    • , Lukas Gudmundsson
    •  & Sonia I. Seneviratne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ecological niche of a given microbe is difficult to define, but can be approximated from the range of biochemical reactions encoded by its genome. Here the authors use these genomic data and analyze them using manifold learning, which generates a diffusion map of the metabolic niche space of over 2500 bacteria.

    • Ashkaan K. Fahimipour
    •  & Thilo Gross

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Satellites provide clear evidence of greening trends in the Arctic, but high-resolution pan-Arctic quantification of these trends is lacking. Here the authors analyse high-resolution Landsat data to show widespread greening in the Arctic, and find that greening trends are linked to summer warming overall but not always locally.

    • Logan T. Berner
    • , Richard Massey
    •  & Scott J. Goetz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How to best allocate limited resources for conserving imperilled species is a difficult challenge. Here the authors analyse data on over 2000 threatened species from USA, Australia, and New Zealand, finding that on average half of the budget is allocated to research and monitoring. Species with higher budget allocation to research and monitoring tend to have poorer recovery outcomes.

    • Rachel T. Buxton
    • , Stephanie Avery-Gomm
    •  & Joseph R. Bennett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes interact in different ways than macro-organisms, but their interactions can still form the basis for broader macroecological patterns like the Species Abundance Distribution. Here, the author shows that thre general ecological patterns can be found in microbes, within and across biome types.

    • Jacopo Grilli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Salvage logging has become a common practice to gain economic returns from naturally disturbed forests, but it could have considerable negative effects on biodiversity. Here the authors use a recently developed statistical method to estimate that ca. 75% of the naturally disturbed forest should be left unlogged to maintain 90% of the species unique to the area.

    • Simon Thorn
    • , Anne Chao
    •  & Alexandro B. Leverkus

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Due to legislative shortfalls, species of global conservation concern can still be captured in commercial fisheries. Here the authors show that 91 threatened species are reported in catch/landing databases, 13 of which are traded internationally despite their conservation concern.

    • Leslie A. Roberson
    • , Reg A. Watson
    •  & Carissa J. Klein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The genetic mechanisms underlying mate choice decisions can inform our understanding of speciation. A study on Heliconius butterflies identifies 5 candidate genes that would allow sympatric species to evolve distinct preferences without altering their visual perception of the wider environment.

    • Matteo Rossi
    • , Alexander E. Hausmann
    •  & Richard M. Merrill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil age is thought to be an important driver of ecosystem development. Here, the authors perform a global survey of soil chronosequences and meta-analysis to show that, contrary to expectations, soil age is a relatively minor ecosystem driver at the biome scale once other drivers such as parent material, climate, and vegetation type are accounted for.

    • Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo
    • , Peter B. Reich
    •  & Noah Fierer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How past climate change has affected biodiversity over large spatial scales remains underexplored. Here, the authors find marked homogenization in flowering plant phylogenetic diversity across Central and Northern Europe linked to rapid climate change and large distances to glacial refugia.

    • Bianca Saladin
    • , Loïc Pellissier
    •  & Niklaus E. Zimmermann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Permafrost locks away the largest reservoir of mercury on the planet, but climate warming threatens to thaw these systems. Here the authors use models to show that unconstrained fossil fuel burning will dramatically increase the amount of mercury released into future ecosystems.

    • Kevin Schaefer
    • , Yasin Elshorbany
    •  & Elsie M. Sunderland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) is an osmolyte produced by marine microbes that plays an important role in nutrient cycling and atmospheric chemistry. Here the authors go to the Mariana Trench—the deepest point in the ocean—and find bacteria are key DMSP producers, and that DMSP has a role in protection against high pressure.

    • Yanfen Zheng
    • , Jinyan Wang
    •  & Xiao-Hua Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The blooming alga Emiliania huxleyi and its viruses are a model for density-dependent virulent dynamics. However, Knowles et al. show that this host–virus system exhibits temperate dynamics at natural host densities, in a manner dependent on host physiology.

    • Ben Knowles
    • , Juan A. Bonachela
    •  & Kay D. Bidle

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Environmental variability is one potential driver of behavioural and cultural diversity in humans and other animals. Here, the authors show that chimpanzee behavioural diversity is higher in habitats that are more seasonal and historically unstable, and in savannah woodland relative to forested sites.

    • Ammie K. Kalan
    • , Lars Kulik
    •  & Hjalmar S. Kühl

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Assessing the effectiveness of protected areas requires sufficient monitoring data inside and outside of protected areas; such data are lacking in many tropical regions. Here the authors use robust citizen science data on bird occupancy to show that protected areas are effective in maintaining bird species diversity across eight tropical biodiversity hotspots.

    • Victor Cazalis
    • , Karine Princé
    •  & Ana S. L. Rodrigues

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is evidence that reducing plant litter diversity may slow litter decomposition rate. Here, Mori and colleagues perform a global meta-analysis of litter-bag studies to show that mixed-species litter assemblages decompose faster than monospecific assemblages, with a magnitude comparable to the predicted effect of climate warming.

    • Akira S. Mori
    • , J. Hans C. Cornelissen
    •  & Forest Isbell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mapping ecological variables using machine-learning algorithms based on remote-sensing data has become a widespread practice in ecology. Here, the authors use forest biomass mapping as a study case to show that the most common model validation approach, which ignores data spatial structure, leads to overoptimistic assessment of model predictive power.

    • Pierre Ploton
    • , Frédéric Mortier
    •  & Raphaël Pélissier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ecosystem Based Management measures developed to prevent overfishing could be particularly important under climate change. Here the authors combine climate and fish stock modelling to show that EBM cap implementation reduces climate-driven fishery declines under RCP 4.5 and 8.5 before midcentury. However, there are thermal tipping points beyond which potential collapses are predicted.

    • K. K. Holsman
    • , A. C. Haynie
    •  & A. E. Punt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The effectiveness of protected areas depends not only on whether they are intact, but also on whether they are mutually connected. Here the authors examine the structural connectivity of terrestrial protected areas globally, finding that less than 10% of the protected network can be considered connected.

    • Michelle Ward
    • , Santiago Saura
    •  & James E. M. Watson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    According to Zipf’s law, the population size of a city is inversely proportional to its size rank in any urban system. The authors show how demography explains this law as a time average of balanced migration between cities and how deviations express information about people’s net preferences.

    • Luís M. A. Bettencourt
    •  & Daniel Zünd

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Leaf economics spectrum theory has greatly advanced understanding of plant functional ecology, but it is unclear whether its predictions hold in wetland communities. Here, Pan and colleagues analyse leaf economics traits in wetland plants, showing that their trait relationships deviate from fully terrestrial plants, particularly by clustering towards acquisitive plant strategies.

    • Yingji Pan
    • , Ellen Cieraad
    •  & Peter M. van Bodegom

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conversion of natural ecosystems to cropland is a threat to most native wildlife. Here the authors quantify the impact of recent cropland expansion on the habitat of representative pollinator, bird, plant species across the conterminous United States, showing diminished crop yield returns at the cost of important habitat losses.

    • Tyler J. Lark
    • , Seth A. Spawn
    •  & Holly K. Gibbs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The universality of the trade-off between early growth and lifespan in trees and its implications are disputed. Analysing a global tree ring dataset and performing data-driven simulations, the authors demonstrate the pervasiveness of the trade-off and challenge current earth system models that predict a continuation of the carbon sink into mature forests under warming and increasing CO2.

    • R. J. W. Brienen
    • , L. Caldwell
    •  & E. Gloor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Islands have disproportionate importance for biodiversity conservation, yet they may be underrepresented in protected areas. Here the authors assess how climate, geography, habitat diversity, and socio-economic conditions explain terrestrial and marine protected area coverage on inhabited islands and in the surrounding seas globally.

    • David Mouillot
    • , Laure Velez
    •  & Marc Troussellier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conservation biologists often assume that rare (or less abundant) species are more likely to be declining under anthropogenic change. Here, the authors synthesise population trend data for ~2000 animal species to show that population trends cover a wide spectrum of change from losses to gains, which are not related to species rarity.

    • Gergana N. Daskalova
    • , Isla H. Myers-Smith
    •  & John L. Godlee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Wheat yield is sensitive to temperature, but there could be substantial variation in this response across cultivars. Here the authors present data on the climatic responses of wheat cultivars in South Africa, highlighting which cultivars might be better able to maintain yield under warming.

    • Aaron M. Shew
    • , Jesse B. Tack
    •  & Petronella Chaminuka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rarely are the outcomes of mathematical (probability) models of wildlife disease detection used to inform policy or management changes. Here the authors develop a proactive hunting surveillance program that shortened the time required to establish freedom from chronic wasting disease at the population level in reindeer.

    • Atle Mysterud
    • , Petter Hopp
    •  & Hildegunn Viljugrein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pleistocene population dynamics can inform the consequences of current climate change. This phylogeography of 35 complete American mastodon mitochondrial genomes suggests distinct lineages in this species repeatedly expanded northwards and then went locally extinct in response to glacial cycles.

    • Emil Karpinski
    • , Dirk Hackenberger
    •  & Hendrik N. Poinar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies mapping climatologically suitable areas for malaria transmission have used relatively simple thresholds for precipitation. Here the authors show that when models incorporate hydrological processes a more complex pattern of malaria suitability emerges in Africa and future shifts in suitability are more pronounced.

    • M. W. Smith
    • , T. Willis
    •  & C. J. Thomas

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Weather may marginally affect COVID-19 dynamics, but misconceptions about the way that climate and weather drive exposure and transmission have adversely shaped risk perceptions for both policymakers and citizens. Future scientific work on this politically-fraught topic needs a more careful approach.

    • Colin J. Carlson
    • , Ana C. R. Gomez
    •  & Sadie J. Ryan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mangroves and the carbon they store are threatened by deforestation, but the efficacy of policies to protect them is unknown. Here the authors assess changes in mangrove carbon stocks between 1996 and 2016 and show less loss than previous methods estimated, indicating conservation has had a positive effect.

    • Daniel R. Richards
    • , Benjamin S. Thompson
    •  & Lahiru Wijedasa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear how biodiversity-ecosystem functioning and species coexistence mechanisms are linked. Here, Godoy and colleagues combine field-parameterised competition models with a BEF experiment to show that mechanisms leading to more stable species coexistence lead to greater productivity, but not necessarily to enhanced functions other than primary production.

    • Oscar Godoy
    • , Lorena Gómez-Aparicio
    •  & Eric Allan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nearly 17% of all bird species are hosts to obligate brood parasites like the common cuckoo. Antonson et al. show that parasite species hedge their reproductive bets by outsourcing parental care to a greater variety of host species when the rearing environment for their young is more unpredictable.

    • Nicholas D. Antonson
    • , Dustin R. Rubenstein
    •  & Carlos A. Botero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The average body size of salmon has declined rapidly over recent decades. Here the authors quantify changes in body size distributions for Pacific salmon in Alaska and examine the causes and consequences of size declines for ecosystems, food security, and commercial fisheries.

    • K. B. Oke
    • , C. J. Cunningham
    •  & E. P. Palkovacs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plant-pollinator interactions are not fixed but instead can change seasonally and across years. Here, the authors provide a holistic perspective on how plants and pollinators first enter, then comprise, and ultimately leave interaction networks over time.

    • Bernat Bramon Mora
    • , Eura Shin
    •  & Daniel B. Stouffer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ongoing increase of ocean temperatures could have major effects on fish populations. Here the authors model relationships between sea temperature and life history traits in over 300 species, showing that while warming overall accelerates life history traits, changes in population growth depend on the fast–slow life-history continuum.

    • Hui-Yu Wang
    • , Sheng-Feng Shen
    •  & Mikko Heino

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil microbial communities remain active throughout much of the Arctic winter, and Arctic winters are warming dramatically. Here, the authors show that persistently warm winter soils can lead to labile carbon starvation and reduced microbial respiration, despite the high carbon content of most Arctic soils.

    • Patrick F. Sullivan
    • , Madeline C. Stokes
    •  & Michael N. Weintraub

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Floral phenotypes impact interactions between plants and pollinators. Here, the authors show that Moricandia arvensis displays discrete seasonal plasticity in floral phenotype, with large, lilac flowers attracting long-tongued bees in spring and small, rounded, white flowers attracting generalist pollinators in summer.

    • José M. Gómez
    • , Francisco Perfectti
    •  & Rubén Torices

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An insufficient amount of pollen transfer by pollinators (pollen limitation) could reduce plant reproduction in human-impacted landscapes. Here the authors conduct a global meta-analysis and find that pollen limitation is high in urban environments and depends of plant traits such as pollinator dependency.

    • Joanne M. Bennett
    • , Janette A. Steets
    •  & Tia-Lynn Ashman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ocean cold seeps are poorly understood relative to related systems like hydrothermal vents. Here the authors use high pressure bioreactors and microbial communities from a cold seep mud volcano and find a previously missing step of methane conversion to acetate that likely fuels heterotrophic communities.

    • Shanshan Yang
    • , Yongxin Lv
    •  & Yu Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lipo-chitooligosaccharides (LCOs) are signaling molecules produced by certain bacteria and fungi that establish symbiotic relationships with plants. Here, the authors show that LCOs are produced also by many other, non-symbiotic fungi, and regulate fungal growth and development.

    • Tomás Allen Rush
    • , Virginie Puech-Pagès
    •  & Jean-Michel Ané

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil organism biodiversity contributes to ecosystem function, but biodiversity and function have not been equivalently studied across the globe. Here the authors identify locations, environment types, and taxonomic groups for which there is currently a lack of biodiversity and ecosystem function data in the existing literature.

    • Carlos A. Guerra
    • , Anna Heintz-Buschart
    •  & Nico Eisenhauer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brandl, Johansen et al. compare organismal traits, community structure, and productivity dynamics of cryptobenthic reef fishes across two locations, the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, the former of which harbors the world’s hottest coral reefs. They show that environmental extremes in the Arabian Gulf result in dramatically less diverse, abundant, and productive cryptobenthic fish assemblages, which could foreshadow the future of coral reef biodiversity and functioning.

    • Simon J. Brandl
    • , Jacob L. Johansen
    •  & John A. Burt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sedimentary DNA can be used to infer how organisms responded to changing environmental conditions over millennia. Here, the authors use sedimentary DNA of micro-eukaryotes in low-elevation (human-impacted) and high-elevation (more pristine) lakes to show how human influences have altered lake community composition in the Anthropocene.

    • François Keck
    • , Laurent Millet
    •  & Isabelle Domaizon

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    As investment in urban conservation grows, researchers must balance the needs of residents and conservation targets. We discuss some of the challenges we have encountered and the importance of taking a transdisciplinary approach informed by design and social knowledge.

    • Katherine J. Turo
    •  & Mary M. Gardiner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The discovery of aerobic microbial communities in nutrient-poor sediments below the seafloor begs the question of the mechanisms for their persistence. Here the authors investigate subseafloor sediment in the South Pacific Gyre abyssal plain, showing that aerobic microbial life can be revived and retain metabolic potential even from 101.5 Ma-old sediment.

    • Yuki Morono
    • , Motoo Ito
    •  & Fumio Inagaki

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