Ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is mixed evidence for how temperature affects diversification rates. Here, authors use a supermatrix of nearly 20,000 rosid species, comprising almost a quarter of flowering plants, to show that tropical groups are older and speciated twice as slowly as their counterparts from cooler climates.

    • Miao Sun
    • , Ryan A. Folk
    •  & Robert P. Guralnick

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phenotypic robustness to environmental variation is seemingly at odds with evolvability. Here, the authors analyze carotenoid use and accommodation in feather development across a recent avian range expansion and show that cooption of a stress-buffering mechanism can reconcile robustness and evolvability.

    • Ahva L. Potticary
    • , Erin S. Morrison
    •  & Alexander V. Badyaev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding why certain alien species become naturalized can shed light on biological invasion patterns. In this global analysis on thousands of taxa, van Kleunen and colleagues show that plant species of economic use are more likely to become naturalized, and that this underlies geographic patterns and phylogenetic signals in naturalization

    • Mark van Kleunen
    • , Xinyi Xu
    •  & Trevor S. Fristoe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Terrestrial carbon uptake as high inter-annual variability which can be used to help understand future responses to climate change. Here the authors’ modeling reveals a large portion of this variability is driven by human land use changes and management, and not captured by other models.

    • Chao Yue
    • , Philippe Ciais
    •  & Alexander A. Nassikas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Habitat complexity influences the sensory ecology of predator-prey interactions. Here, the authors show that habitat complexity also affects the use of different decision-making paradigms, namely habit- and plan-based action selection. Simulations across habitat types show that only savanna-like terrestrial habitats favor planning during visually-guided predator evasion, while aquatic and simple terrestrial habitats do not.

    • Ugurcan Mugan
    •  & Malcolm A. MacIver

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether rapid global change will lead to unexpected trait combinations. In this global meta-analysis on vascular plants, Cui et al. show that, although within-species responses do not always follow the leaf economic spectrum, the slopes of interspecific trait relationships are robust to rapid environmental change.

    • Erqian Cui
    • , Ensheng Weng
    •  & Jianyang Xia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ecological niche of host-associated microbes is defined by both abiotic and biotic dimensions. Here the authors analyse published data on fungal and oomycete pathogens of plants, demonstrating that specialization can evolve independently on abiotic and biotic axes and that interactions with host plants reduce thermal niche breadth.

    • Thomas M. Chaloner
    • , Sarah J. Gurr
    •  & Daniel P. Bebber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fire is an important component of many African ecosystems, but prediction of fire activity is challenging. Here, the authors use a statistical framework to assess the seasonal environmental drivers of African fire, which allow for a better prediction of fire activity.

    • Yan Yu
    • , Jiafu Mao
    •  & Yaoping Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Safeguarding protected areas from invasive species is recognised as a global conservation objective. Here, Liu et al. analyse the occurrence of terrestrial alien animal invaders in protected areas and potential drivers globally, suggesting an impending risk for uninvaded protected areas in absence of preventive actions.

    • Xuan Liu
    • , Tim M. Blackburn
    •  & Yiming Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding why many species ranges are contracting while others are stable or expanding is important to inform conservation in an increasingly human-modified world. Here, Pacifici and colleagues investigate changes in the ranges of 204 mammals, showing that human factors mostly explain range contractions while life history explains both contraction and expansion.

    • Michela Pacifici
    • , Carlo Rondinini
    •  & Moreno Di Marco

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impact of late Pleistocene climate change on ecosystems has been hard to assess. Here, the authors sequence ancient DNA from Hall’s Cave, Texas and find that both plant and vertebrate diversity decreased with cooling, and though plant diversity recovered with rewarming, megafauna went extinct.

    • Frederik V. Seersholm
    • , Daniel J. Werndly
    •  & Michael Bunce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Seasonal influenza epidemics vary in timing and size, but the causes of the variation remain unclear. Here, the authors analyse a 15-year city-level data set, and find that fluctuations in climatic factors do not predict onset timing, and that while antigenic change does not have a consistent effect on epidemic size, the timing of onset and heterosubtypic competition do.

    • Edward K. S. Lam
    • , Dylan H. Morris
    •  & Colin A. Russell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parasitic interactions are difficult to document in the fossil record. Here, Zhang et al. analyze a large population of a Cambrian brachiopod and show it was frequently encrusted by tubes aligned to its feeding currents and that encrustation was associated with reduced biomass, suggesting a fitness cost.

    • Zhifei Zhang
    • , Luke C. Strotz
    •  & Glenn A. Brock

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Biology can profoundly influence the planet’s climate, but over Earth’s long history these effects are poorly constrained. Here the authors show that on early Earth, the evolution of microbes producing and consuming methane likely controlled warming and glacial events, and thus Earth’s habitability

    • Boris Sauterey
    • , Benjamin Charnay
    •  & Régis Ferrière

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Environmental change and species diversity could jointly affect the stability of animal communities. Here the authors use citizen science data on bats, birds, and butterflies along urbanization and agricultural intensification gradients in France to show that both environmental change and diversity loss destabilise communities, but in different ways.

    • Théophile Olivier
    • , Elisa Thébault
    •  & Colin Fontaine

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In animal groups, the degree of alignment of individuals could have different benefits and costs for individuals depending on their reliance on private or social information. Here the authors show that in shoals of three-spined sticklebacks, some individuals reach resources faster when groups are disordered, a state which favours reliance on privately acquired information, while other individuals reach resources faster when groups are ordered, allowing them to exploit social information more effectively.

    • Hannah E. A. MacGregor
    • , James E. Herbert-Read
    •  & Christos C. Ioannou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Both geography and ecology can drive the origins of new species. Siqueira et al. show how geological changes in the structure of Miocene reefs and the concurrent evolution of new feeding strategies combine to explain why coral reefs contain such a diversity of fish species.

    • Alexandre C. Siqueira
    • , Renato A. Morais
    •  & Peter F. Cowman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutualism is typically portrayed as a destabilizing process in community ecology. Here, via a random matrix model that considers species density, the author shows that mutualistic interactions can, in fact, enhance population density at equilibrium and increase community resilience to perturbation.

    • Lewi Stone

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Associations with mycorrhizal fungi can affect the outcome of plant competition in complex ways. Here the authors use a decade-long field survey and two hyphal exclusion experiments to reveal a critical role of underground fungal networks in facilitating seedling growth and fitness of ectomycorrhizal plants but not arbuscular mycorrhizal plants.

    • Minxia Liang
    • , David Johnson
    •  & Xubing Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extracting causality from time series on natural populations is challenging. Here the authors apply empirical dynamical modeling to 25 years of fish survey data from North Sea fisheries to quantify causal effects of age structure, abundance, and environment on population spatial variability, finding both common and species-specific patterns.

    • Jheng-Yu Wang
    • , Ting-Chun Kuo
    •  & Chih-hao Hsieh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ubiquitous oceanic bacteria harbour an external phosphate buffer for modulating phosphate (Pi) uptake. Here, using both oceanic SAR11, Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus strains as a model, the authors show that the Pi buffer accumulation in the periplasm is proton motive force-dependent and can be enhanced by light energy.

    • Nina A. Kamennaya
    • , Kalotina Geraki
    •  & Mikhail V. Zubkov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is crucial yet challenging to identify cause-consequence relation in complex dynamical systems where direct causal links can mix with indirect ones. Leng et al. propose a data-driven model-independent method to distinguish direct from indirect causality and test its applicability to real-world data.

    • Siyang Leng
    • , Huanfei Ma
    •  & Luonan Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, Pasolli et al. perform a large-scale genome-wide comparative analysis of publicly available and newly sequenced food and human metagenomes to investigate the prevalence and diversity of lactic acid bacteria (LAB), indicating food as a major source of LAB species in the human gut.

    • Edoardo Pasolli
    • , Francesca De Filippis
    •  & Danilo Ercolini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The drivers of genetic diversity (GD) are poorly understood at the global scale. Here the authors show, for terrestrial mammals, that within-species GD covaries with phylogenetic diversity and is higher in locations with more stable past climates. They also interpolate GD for data-poor locations such as the tropics.

    • Spyros Theodoridis
    • , Damien A. Fordham
    •  & David Nogues-Bravo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sensory drive theory posits that selection on sexual signals should depend on the environmental background. Here, Hulse et al. analyze the spatial statistics of body patterning in 10 darter fish species and find a correlation with habitat spatial statistics only for males, consistent with sexual selection via sensory drive.

    • Samuel V. Hulse
    • , Julien P. Renoult
    •  & Tamra C. Mendelson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Density-dependence is rarely accounted for in plant-plant facilitation studies. Here the authors develop a framework that incorporates density-dependence in the stress-gradient hypothesis, and test it first through modeling and then empirically on Arabidopsis thaliana along salt stress gradients.

    • Ruichang Zhang
    •  & Katja Tielbörger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Warming is expected to increase C sink capacity in high-latitude ecosystems, but plant-herbivore interactions could moderate or offset this effect. Here, Silfver and colleagues test individual and interactive effects of warming and insect herbivory in a field experiment in Subarctic forest, showing that even low intensity insect herbivory strongly reduces C sink potential.

    • Tarja Silfver
    • , Lauri Heiskanen
    •  & Juha Mikola

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lake fisheries are vulnerable to environmental changes. Here, Kao et al. develop a Bayesian networks model to analyze time-series data from 31 major fisheries lake across five continents, showing that fish catches can respond either positively or negatively to climate and land-use changes.

    • Yu-Chun Kao
    • , Mark W. Rogers
    •  & Joelle D. Young

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Snow algae bloom along the coast of Antarctica and are likely to be biogeochemically important. Here, the authors produced the first map of such blooms, show that they are driven by warmer temperatures and proximity to birds and mammals, and are likely to increase given projected climate changes.

    • Andrew Gray
    • , Monika Krolikowski
    •  & Matthew P. Davey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Key events in human evolution are thought to have occurred between 3 and 2.5 Ma, but the fossil record of this period is sparse. Here, Alemseged et al. report a new fossil site from this period, Mille-Logya, Ethiopia, and characterize the geology, basin evolution and fauna, including specimens of Homo.

    • Zeresenay Alemseged
    • , Jonathan G. Wynn
    •  & Joseph Mohan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The causes of the Upper Pleistocene megafauna extinction in Australia and New Guinea are debated, but fossil data are lacking for much of this region. Here, Hocknull and colleagues report a new, diverse megafauna assemblage from north-eastern Australia that persisted until ~40,000 years ago.

    • Scott A. Hocknull
    • , Richard Lewis
    •  & Rochelle A. Lawrence

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In birds, the hand-wing index is a morphological trait that can be used as a proxy for flight efficiency. Here the authors examine variation of hand-wing index in over 10,000 bird species, finding that it is higher in migratory and non-territorial species, and lower in the tropics.

    • Catherine Sheard
    • , Montague H. C. Neate-Clegg
    •  & Joseph A. Tobias

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Coastal systems are hotspots of ecological, geochemical and economic activity, yet their dynamics are not accurately represented in global models. In this Review, Ward and colleagues assess the current state of coastal science and recommend approaches for including the coastal interface in predictive models.

    • Nicholas D. Ward
    • , J. Patrick Megonigal
    •  & Lisamarie Windham-Myers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fast metabolisms tend to shorten lifespans by increasing oxidative damage. This study identifies a gene mutation that keeps a key antioxidant response active, possibly allowing Neoaves bird species to avoid the tradeoff between rapid metabolism and longevity that challenges most mammals, including humans.

    • Gianni M. Castiglione
    • , Zhenhua Xu
    •  & Elia J. Duh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In contrast to bird plumage, little is known about the evolution of bird skin color. Here, Nicolaï et al. find that black skin has evolved over 100 times in birds and is associated with baldness and/or white feathers as well as with high irradiation habitats, suggesting a role in UV protection.

    • Michaël P. J. Nicolaï
    • , Matthew D. Shawkey
    •  & Liliana D’Alba

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The spatial organisation of microbial communities is caused by the interplay of biotic and abiotic factors. Here the authors design a microfluidic platform to quantify the spatiotemporal parameters influencing diffusion-mediated interactions, and use this device to investigate information transmission and metabolic cross-feeding in synthetic microbial consortia.

    • Sonali Gupta
    • , Tyler D. Ross
    •  & Ophelia S. Venturelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Developmental duration is a key life-history trait. Cooney et al. compile data on 3096 bird species to quantify the degree to which phylogenetic history, body size and ecological variables like predation risk or breeding phenology influence variation in developmental duration.

    • Christopher R. Cooney
    • , Catherine Sheard
    •  & Alison E. Wright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Metagenome approaches can unravel relationships between environment, community composition, and ecological functions. Here, the authors show that bacterial communities sampled from rainwater pools can be clustered into few classes with distinct functional capacities and genetic repertoires, the assembly of which is likely driven by local conditions.

    • Alberto Pascual-García
    •  & Thomas Bell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is generally thought many microbes, owing to their ubiquity and dispersal capability, lack biogeographic structuring and clear speciation patterns compared to macroorganisms. However, Pinseel et al. demonstrate multiple cycles of colonization and diversification in Pinnularia borealis, a rare biosphere soil diatom.

    • Eveline Pinseel
    • , Steven B. Janssens
    •  & Wim Vyverman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plastic pollution has infiltrated every ecosystem, but few studies have quantified the biogeochemical or ecological effects of plastic. Here the authors show that microplastics in ocean sediment can significantly alter microbial community structure and nitrogen cycling.

    • Meredith E. Seeley
    • , Bongkeun Song
    •  & Robert C. Hale

  • Article
    | Open Access

    One-third of Earth’s carbon is sequestered in peatlands, and its stability in the face of climate change is unknown. Here the authors show that warming leads to the release of carbon as methane, but only the most prolonged warming leads to the breakdown and release of deep, old carbon.

    • A. M. Hopple
    • , R. M. Wilson
    •  & S. D. Bridgham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Prior studies have investigated macroecological patterns of host sharing among viruses, although certain mammal clades have not been represented in these analyses, and the findings have not been used to predict the true network. Here the authors model the species level traits that predict viral sharing across all mammal clades and validate their predictions using an independent dataset.

    • Gregory F. Albery
    • , Evan A. Eskew
    •  & Kevin J. Olival

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