Ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The relationships between ecosystem productivity and plant diversity are complex. Here, the authors show that sites with high productivity typically have reduced species diversity but high functional and phylogenetic diversity, potentially owing to the creation of additional niche space.

    • Philipp Brun
    • , Niklaus E. Zimmermann
    •  & Wilfried Thuiller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The contribution of symbiotic dinitrogen fixation to the forest carbon sink could change throughout forest succession. Here the authors model nitrogen cycling and light competition between trees based on data from Panamanian forest plots, showing that fixation contributes substantially to the carbon sink in early successional stages.

    • Jennifer H. Levy-Varon
    • , Sarah A. Batterman
    •  & Lars O. Hedin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Numerous feathered dinosaurs and early birds have been discovered from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, but the early evolution of feather-feeding insects is not clear. Here, Gao et al. describe a new family of ectoparasitic insects from 10 specimens found associated with feathers in mid-Cretaceous amber.

    • Taiping Gao
    • , Xiangchu Yin
    •  & Dong Ren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies have examined fixed traits that correlate with plant invasiveness. Here the authors use a database of population matrices to compare demographic traits of invasive species in their native and invaded ranges, finding that demographic amplification is an important predictor of invasiveness.

    • Kim Jelbert
    • , Danielle Buss
    •  & Dave Hodgson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photosynthesis generates reactive oxygen species that can damage cells. Here, the authors show that unicellular predators of photosynthetic prey have shared responses to photosynthetic oxidative stress and these may also have been important for the evolution of endosymbiosis.

    • Akihiro Uzuka
    • , Yusuke Kobayashi
    •  & Shin-ya Miyagishima

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate affects dynamics of infectious diseases, but the impact on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) epidemiology isn’t well understood. Here, Baker et al. model the influence of temperature, humidity and rainfall on RSV epidemiology in the USA and Mexico and predict impact of climate change on RSV dynamics.

    • Rachel E. Baker
    • , Ayesha S. Mahmud
    •  & Bryan T. Grenfell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent studies have suggested that hybridization can facilitate adaptive radiations. Here, the authors show that opportunity for hybridization differentiates Lake Mweru, where cichlids radiated, and Lake Bangweulu, where cichlids did not radiate despite ecological opportunity in both lakes.

    • Joana I. Meier
    • , Rike B. Stelkens
    •  & Ole Seehausen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Abrupt land changes may have long-lasting effects on local biodiversity. Here, Jung et al. show that past abrupt land change reduces species richness and abundance, and alters assemblage composition, with recovery often taking more than 10 years.

    • Martin Jung
    • , Pedram Rowhani
    •  & Jörn P. W. Scharlemann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Healthy coral reefs have an acoustic signature known to be attractive to coral and fish larvae during settlement. Here the authors use playback experiments in the field to show that healthy reef sounds can increase recruitment of juvenile fishes to degraded coral reef habitat, suggesting that acoustic playback could be used as a reef management strategy.

    • Timothy A. C. Gordon
    • , Andrew N. Radford
    •  & Stephen D. Simpson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Viral genomic DNA is often modified to evade the host bacterial restriction system. Here the authors identified 2′-deoxy-7-deazaguanine modifications on phage DNA by comparative genomics and experimental validation, showing their role in genome protection.

    • Geoffrey Hutinet
    • , Witold Kot
    •  & Valérie de Crécy-Lagard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate-induced poleward shifts in plant distributions could flatten latitudinal diversity gradients. However, here the authors show that the spread of forests after the last ice age reduced diversity in central and northern Europe, and that human land-use over the past 5000 years strengthened the latitudinal gradient in plant diversity.

    • Thomas Giesecke
    • , Steffen Wolters
    •  & Simon Brewer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains challenging to estimate carbon accumulation rates in tidal wetlands on a scale as large as the conterminous US. Here, the authors find that mean C accumulation rates vary greatly among watershed regions but not among vegetation types, and that tidal wetlands’ C sequestration capability will remain or increase by 2100, suggesting a resilience to sea level rise.

    • Faming Wang
    • , Xiaoliang Lu
    •  & Jianwu Tang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna extinctions were caused by climate change, humans, or both is debated. Here, the authors infer the spatio-temporal trajectories of regional extinctions and find that water availability mediates the relationship among climate, human migration and megafauna extinctions.

    • Frédérik Saltré
    • , Joël Chadoeuf
    •  & Corey J. A. Bradshaw

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Asian summer monsoons and their links to global temperature changes have been the subject of intense debate. Here the authors reconstruct the Asian monsoon climate since the late Miocene, using plant silica records of C4 and C3 grasses in central China, and find that global cooling caused Asian monsoon rainfall to decrease markedly in the late Pliocene.

    • Hanlin Wang
    • , Huayu Lu
    •  & Yichao Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Greenhouse gas mitigation can involve land-use changes that alter the habitat available for wildlife. Here, Ohashi et al. perform an integrated assessment showing that climate mitigation can be beneficial for global biodiversity but may entail local biodiversity losses where land-based mitigation is implemented.

    • Haruka Ohashi
    • , Tomoko Hasegawa
    •  & Tetsuya Matsui

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exceptional alpine plant diversity exists in the Hengduan Mountains. Here, through genome assembly and population genomics studies, the authors find notable intraspecific divergence among Cushion willow populations isolated by the sky island-like habitats and consider it contributes to speciation and biodiversity.

    • Jia-hui Chen
    • , Yuan Huang
    •  & Hang Sun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Broad scale patterns in the distribution of animal community functional properties could be determined by climate and disrupted by human activities. Here the authors show global patterns in large-mammal trophic structure related to climate variation, which human activities simplify in predictable ways.

    • Manuel Mendoza
    •  & Miguel B. Araújo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Modelling collective behaviour in different circumstances remains a challenge because of uncertainty related to interaction rule changes. Here, the authors report plasticity in local interaction rules in flocks of wild jackdaws with implications for both natural and artificial collective systems.

    • Hangjian Ling
    • , Guillam E. Mclvor
    •  & Nicholas T. Ouellette

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors assemble and analyse previously generated mycobiome data linked to geographical locations across the world. They describe the distribution of fungal taxa and show that climate is an important driver of fungal biogeography and that fungal diversity appears to be concentrated at high latitudes.

    • Tomáš Větrovský
    • , Petr Kohout
    •  & Petr Baldrian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Warmer temperatures could increase the growth and metabolic rates of microbes. Here, the authors assemble a dataset of thermal performance curves for over 400 bacteria and archaea, showing that metabolic rates are likely to increase under warming, with implications for global carbon cycling.

    • Thomas P. Smith
    • , Thomas J. H. Thomas
    •  & Samrāt Pawar

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Improving estimates of forest biomass based on remote sensing data is important to assess global carbon cycling. Here the authors develop an approach to use forest gap models to simulate lidar waveforms and compare the outputs with ICESAT-1 GLAS profiles, showing improved estimates across the Amazon basin.

    • Edna Rödig
    • , Nikolai Knapp
    •  & Andreas Huth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mycorrhizas—mutualistic relationships formed between fungi and most plant species—are functionally linked to soil carbon stocks. Here the authors map the global distribution of mycorrhizal plants and quantify links between mycorrhizal vegetation patterns and terrestrial carbon stocks.

    • Nadejda A. Soudzilovskaia
    • , Peter M. van Bodegom
    •  & Leho Tedersoo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nitrogen mineralisation (Nmin), an important index of soil fertility, is often determined in the laboratory, with an uncertain relationship to Nmin under field conditions. Here the authors show that combining laboratory measurements with environmental data greatly improves predictions of field Nmin at a global scale.

    • A. C. Risch
    • , S. Zimmermann
    •  & B. Moser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many species’ life cycles have moved earlier in the year because of climate change, but we do not know the consequences for range expansions. The authors show that these advances promote range expansions in species with multiple reproductive cycles per year, but not in species with only one.

    • Callum J. Macgregor
    • , Chris D. Thomas
    •  & Jane K. Hill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is ongoing interest in linking soil microbial diversity to ecosystem function. Here the authors manipulate the diversity and composition of microbial communities and show that complex microbial networks contribute more to ecosystem multifunctionality than simpler or low-diversity networks.

    • Cameron Wagg
    • , Klaus Schlaeppi
    •  & Marcel G. A. van der Heijden

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Based on single worm whole genome sequencing, the authors here characterise the global evolution of the gastrointestinal parasite Haemonchus contortus and identify genes that play a role in drug resistance as well as climate-driven adaptations involving an epigenetic regulator.

    • G. Sallé
    • , S. R. Doyle
    •  & J. A. Cotton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential of organic methods is poorly understood. Here, the authors assess the GHG impact of a 100% shift to organic food production in England and Wales and find that direct GHG emissions are reduced with organic farming, but when increased land use abroad to allow for production shortfalls is factored in, GHG emissions are elevated well-above the baseline.

    • Laurence G. Smith
    • , Guy J. D. Kirk
    •  & Adrian G. Williams

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Protected areas are important refugia for wildlife, so if climate conditions within them change, wildlife could lose critical suitable habitat. Here the authors calculate the projected gain and loss of climate conditions within terrestrial protected areas worldwide.

    • Samuel Hoffmann
    • , Severin D. H. Irl
    •  & Carl Beierkuhnlein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Satellite-borne radar systems are promising tools to obtain spatial habitat data with complete geographic coverage. Here the authors show that freely available Sentinel-1 radar data perform as well as standard airborne laser scanning data for mapping biodiversity of 12 taxa across temperate forests in Germany.

    • Soyeon Bae
    • , Shaun R. Levick
    •  & Jörg Müller

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Swarms of crustaceans called krill dominate Antarctic ecosystems, yet their influence on biogeochemical cycles remains a mystery. Here Cavan and colleagues review the role of krill in the Southern Ocean, and the impact of the krill fishery on ocean fertilisation and the carbon sink.

    • E. L. Cavan
    • , A. Belcher
    •  & P. W. Boyd

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Individual-based models are widely used to simulate complex systems of interacting agents. Here the authors provide a mathematical framework that automates the analysis of any model in a wide class, facilitating a deeper understanding of the scientific questions these models are used to address.

    • Stephen J. Cornell
    • , Yevhen F. Suprunenko
    •  & Otso Ovaskainen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parental care can take many forms but how this diversity arises is not well understood. Here, the authors compile data for over 1300 amphibian species and show that different forms of care evolve at different rates, prolonged care can be easily reduced, and biparental care is evolutionarily unstable.

    • Andrew I. Furness
    •  & Isabella Capellini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The capacity to predict zoonotic disease outbreaks is hampered by data availability and complex relationships between humans, wildlife, and the environment. Here the authors present a modelling framework that identifies potential high-risk locations for Ebola outbreaks under various climatic, demographic, and land use scenarios.

    • David W. Redding
    • , Peter M. Atkinson
    •  & Kate E. Jones

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The defaunation of vertebrates may disrupt forest functioning through the loss of plant-animal interactions, but impacts on forests remain unquantified. Here the authors show that seed dispersal is a key interaction and defaunation of primates and birds negatively impacts forest regeneration.

    • Charlie J. Gardner
    • , Jake E. Bicknell
    •  & Zoe G. Davies

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about the long-term dynamics of mesopelagic fish despite their large contribution to total fish biomass. Here, the authors analyze the Santa Barbara Basin otolith record and suggest that mesopelagic fish populations were large but fluctuated with surface climate over the last ~2000 years.

    • William A. Jones
    •  & David M. Checkley Jr.

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Methane metabolism by some lineages of Archaea contributes to the cycling of carbon on Earth. Here, the authors show high diversity of methyl-coenzyme M reductase (Mcr), a key enzyme associated with archaeal methane/alkane metabolism, in hot spring Archaea, and investigate their ecological roles and evolution.

    • Zheng-Shuang Hua
    • , Yu-Lin Wang
    •  & Wen-Jun Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deep learning has the potential to identify ecological relationships between environment and complex phenotypes that are difficult to quantify. Here, the authors use deep learning to analyse associations among elevation, climate and phenotype across ~2000 moth species in Taiwan.

    • Shipher Wu
    • , Chun-Min Chang
    •  & Sheng-Feng Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (c. 55 million years ago) was a period associated with massive carbon injection into the atmosphere, yet discrepancies in carbon isotope proxy records have led to substantial uncertainties in the source, scale, and timing of carbon emissions. Here, the authors propose that membrane lipids of marine planktonic archaea can reliably record the carbon isotope excursion and surface ocean warming, giving a new constraint for the source and size of the PETM carbon emissions.

    • Felix J. Elling
    • , Julia Gottschalk
    •  & Ann Pearson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Policies aiming to preserve vegetated coastal ecosystems (VCE) to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions require national assessments of blue carbon resources. Here the authors assessed organic carbon storage in VCE across Australian and the potential annual CO2 emission benefits of VCE conservation and find that Australia contributes substantially the carbon stored in VCE globally.

    • Oscar Serrano
    • , Catherine E. Lovelock
    •  & Carlos M. Duarte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Compared to motherhood, the molecular changes associated with fatherhood are less understood. Here, the authors investigate gene expression changes associated with paternal care in male stickleback fish, and compare them with patterns in territorial aggression.

    • Syed Abbas Bukhari
    • , Michael C. Saul
    •  & Alison M. Bell

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