Ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, Sieradzki et al. use metatranscriptomics to study active community-wide viral infections at three coastal California sites throughout a year, identify potential viral hosts, and show that viruses can contribute a substantial amount to photosystem-II psbA expression.

    • Ella T. Sieradzki
    • , J. Cesar Ignacio-Espinoza
    •  & Jed A. Fuhrman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural architecture may be shaped by selection, but is likely also constrained by development. Here, Keesey and colleagues find an inverse relationship between allocation towards visual and olfactory sensory systems across the genus Drosophila, which may reflect a developmental trade-off.

    • Ian W. Keesey
    • , Veit Grabe
    •  & Bill S. Hansson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Obtaining data on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from healthy human populations is difficult. Here, Hendriksen et al. use metagenomic analysis to obtain AMR data from untreated sewage from 79 sites in 60 countries, finding correlations with socio-economic, health and environmental factors.

    • Rene S. Hendriksen
    • , Patrick Munk
    •  & Frank M. Aarestrup

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unclear whether microbes and animals residing in soils follow similar distribution patterns. Here, the authors report richness and diversity of soil microbes and invertebrates across soil, vegetation, and land use gradients in Wales, showing that land use affects animals while soil traits affect microbes.

    • Paul B. L. George
    • , Delphine Lallias
    •  & Davey L. Jones

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fossil record shows a decline in dinosaur diversity preceding their mass extinction. Here, the authors apply ecological niche modelling to show that suitable dinosaur habitat was declining in areas with present-day rock-outcrop, but not across North America as a whole, possibly generating sampling bias in the fossil record.

    • Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza
    • , Philip D. Mannion
    •  & Peter A. Allison

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lurgi et al. analyse the distribution of microbial symbionts across many sponge species and reveal modules of non-random associations which are primarily driven by host features and microbial phylogenies, and less by the environment. Results also show that metabolic functions are distinct across modules.

    • Miguel Lurgi
    • , Torsten Thomas
    •  & Jose M. Montoya

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Antarctic biodiversity is increasingly under threat. Here, Wauchope et al. provide a continent-wide assessment of its terrestrial biodiversity, and find biodiversity protection is regionally uneven and biased towards easily detectable and charismatic species.

    • Hannah S. Wauchope
    • , Justine D. Shaw
    •  & Aleks Terauds

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forecasting of infectious disease outbreaks can inform appropriate intervention measures, but whether fundamental limits to accurate prediction exist is unclear. Here, the authors use permutation entropy as a model independent measure of predictability to study limitations across a broad set of infectious diseases.

    • Samuel V. Scarpino
    •  & Giovanni Petri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Ediacara biota—the first large, complex organisms to evolve on Earth—disappeared prior to the radiation of animals during the Cambrian Period. Here, Muscente et al. perform network analysis of Ediacaran fossils and show that there were two global extinction events before the Cambrian radiation.

    • A. D. Muscente
    • , Natalia Bykova
    •  & Andrew H. Knoll

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Viruses can encode genes that regulate the host's translational machinery to their advantage. Here, the authors show that viruses encode ribosomal proteins that can be incorporated into the host’s ribosome and may affect translation.

    • Carolina M. Mizuno
    • , Charlotte Guyomar
    •  & Mart Krupovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Abandoned and degraded agricultural lands undergo ecological succession that sequesters atmospheric CO2 as soil carbon, but at low rates. Here the authors show that restoration of high plant diversity provides a greenhouse gas benefit by greatly increasing the rate of soil carbon sequestration on such lands.

    • Yi Yang
    • , David Tilman
    •  & Clarence Lehman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There has been a lack of multi-year landscape-scale studies on the effect of neonicotinoids on honeybee health. Here, Osterman et al. show that clothianidin exposure via seed-treated rapeseed has no negative impact on honeybee colony development, microbial pathogens/symbionts or immune gene expression.

    • Julia Osterman
    • , Dimitry Wintermantel
    •  & Joachim R. de Miranda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa undergoes complex trait adaptation within cystic fibrosis patients. Here, Bartell, Sommer, and colleagues use statistical modeling of longitudinal isolates to characterize the joint genetic and phenotypic evolutionary trajectories of P. aeruginosa within hosts.

    • Jennifer A. Bartell
    • , Lea M. Sommer
    •  & Helle Krogh Johansen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reversible phenotypic plasticity is expected to be favoured by long lifespan, as this increases the environmental variation individuals experience. Here, the authors develop a model showing how phenotypic plasticity can drive selection on lifespan, leading to coevolution of these traits.

    • Irja I. Ratikainen
    •  & Hanna Kokko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent efforts have been made to apply ecological theory on succession to understand the dynamics of human microbiomes throughout development. Here, Guittar et al. use a trait-based approach to show how microbial traits putatively related to dispersal and environmental tolerance shift in the infant microbiome over the first three years of life.

    • John Guittar
    • , Ashley Shade
    •  & Elena Litchman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear when and why the world’s oceans, once largely occupied by bacteria, became dominated by photosynthetic algae. Here, using fossil lipids in million year old rocks, the authors show that predation after the Snowball Earth glaciations created the opportunity for a global shift to algal ecosystems.

    • Lennart M. van Maldegem
    • , Pierre Sansjofre
    •  & Christian Hallmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The structure and distribution of strain-level diversity in host-associated bacterial communities is largely unexplored. Here, Ellegaard and Engel analyze strain level diversity of the honey bee gut microbiota, showing that bees from the same colony differ in strain but not phylotype composition.

    • Kirsten M. Ellegaard
    •  & Philipp Engel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been thought that land plants suffered a mass extinction along with animals at the end of the Permian. Here, Nowak et al. show that the apparent plant mass extinction is a result of biases in the fossil record and their reanalysis suggests a lower magnitude and more selective plant extinction.

    • Hendrik Nowak
    • , Elke Schneebeli-Hermann
    •  & Evelyn Kustatscher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The continental record of the end Permian mass extinction is limited, especially from high paleolatitudes. Here, Fielding et al. report a multi-proxy Permo-Triassic record from Australia, resolving the timing of local terrestrial plant extinction and the relationship with environmental changes.

    • Christopher R. Fielding
    • , Tracy D. Frank
    •  & James L. Crowley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The utility of UV vision for visualizing habitat structure is poorly known. Here, the authors use optical models and multispectral imaging to show that UV vision reveals sharp visual contrasts between leaf surfaces, potentially an advantage in navigating forest environments.

    • Cynthia Tedore
    •  & Dan-Eric Nilsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phylogenetic turnover measures the evolutionary distance between species assemblages. Here, Saladin et al. analyze the phylogenetic turnover of European tetrapods after controlling for geographic distance and show greater roles of environment in recent evolutionary history for ectotherms than for endotherms.

    • Bianca Saladin
    • , Wilfried Thuiller
    •  & Niklaus E. Zimmermann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Given the size differences between the autotrophs in aquatic and terrestrial systems, it is unclear whether the same metabolic scaling patterns apply in both groups. Here the authors unify previous datasets and show that plankton and trees follow similar power-law scaling of individual size distributions.

    • Daniel M. Perkins
    • , Andrea Perna
    •  & Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Biological complexity has impeded our ability to predict the dynamics of mutualistic interactions. Here, the authors deduce a general rule to predict outcomes of mutualistic systems and introduce an approach that permits making predictions even in the absence of knowledge of mechanistic details.

    • Feilun Wu
    • , Allison J. Lopatkin
    •  & Lingchong You

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the role of forest fires in Earth’s climate system is critical to predict future fire-climate interactions. Here the authors show that fire-induced forest loss accounts for ~15% of global forest loss and that its impact on surface temperature depends on evapotranspiration and albedo.

    • Zhihua Liu
    • , Ashley P. Ballantyne
    •  & L. Annie Cooper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Stocking of hatchery produced fish is widely used to supplement wild fish populations. Here, the authors show that supplementary stocking can unintentionally favour introgressed individuals with domestic genotypes and compromise the fitness of a wild population of Atlantic salmon.

    • Ingerid J. Hagen
    • , Arne J. Jensen
    •  & Sten Karlsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Increased extreme wet and dry years and forest growth loss from drought legacy effect lead to a question whether wetness events can conversely compensate for this loss. Here the authors report substantial growth enhancement after extreme wetness compensating for drought-induced growth loss globally.

    • Peng Jiang
    • , Hongyan Liu
    •  & Hongya Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Primates utilise human-modified landscapes, and how they do so can provide key conservation insights. This study shows that primates using anthropic lands are less often threatened with extinction, but more often diurnal, not strictly arboreal, with medium or large body sizes, and habitat generalists.

    • Carmen Galán-Acedo
    • , Víctor Arroyo-Rodríguez
    •  & Robert M. Ewers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Examples of overdominance are usually explained by deleterious effects in homozygotes. Here, Kellenberger et al. describe a case of overdominance in the floral color of the Alpine orchid Gymnadenia rhellicani apparently maintained by pollinator preferences without deleterious effects in homozygotes.

    • Roman T. Kellenberger
    • , Kelsey J. R. P. Byers
    •  & Philipp M. Schlüter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There has been recent interest in understanding why the biodiversity-productivity relationship varies among studies and across scales. Here Fei et al. show that climatic variation drives forest biodiversity-productivity relationships at large spatial scales, whilst biotic and abiotic factors are important in given climate units.

    • Songlin Fei
    • , Insu Jo
    •  & Eckehard G. Brockerhoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flaviviruses have emerged or re-emerged in several regions, but factors underlying emergence are incompletely understood. Here, Pandit et al. identify potential sylvatic reservoirs of flaviviruses and, in combination with vector distribution data, predict regions of global vulnerability.

    • Pranav S. Pandit
    • , Megan M. Doyle
    •  & Christine K. Johnson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The potential impact of neonicotinoid field exposure on bumblebee microbiota remains unclear. In a landscape—scale study, Wintermantel et al. show that whilst exposure to clothianidin impacts Bombus terrestris performance, it does not affect levels of gut bacteria, viruses or intracellular parasites.

    • Dimitry Wintermantel
    • , Barbara Locke
    •  & Joachim R. de Miranda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although components of animal mating signals are often studied separately, many animals produce complex multimodal displays. Here, the authors show that the courtship display of male broad-tailed hummingbirds consists of synchronized motions, sounds, and colors that occur within just 300 milliseconds.

    • Benedict G. Hogan
    •  & Mary Caswell Stoddard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Locations in the ocean where CO2 naturally seeps from the seafloor can be used to infer potential responses to ocean acidification. Here the authors explore the functional composition of benthic communities along a natural CO2 gradient, showing a loss of functional diversity at high-CO2 sites.

    • Nuria Teixidó
    • , Maria Cristina Gambi
    •  & Enric Ballesteros

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Northern tree populations may not benefit under climate change, with implications for assisted migration and range expansion. Here, Isaac-Renton et al. show that leading-edge lodgepole pine populations have fewer characteristics of drought-tolerance, so may not adapt to tolerate drier conditions.

    • Miriam Isaac-Renton
    • , David Montwé
    •  & Kerstin Treydte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The late Paleozoic was a time of major transition for tetrapods. Here, Brocklehurst and colleagues analyse the biogeography of Paleozoic tetrapods and find shifts in dispersal and vicariance associated with Carboniferous mountain formation and end-Guadalupian climate variability.

    • Neil Brocklehurst
    • , Emma M. Dunne
    •  & Jӧrg Frӧbisch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Herbivorous insects could diversify through radiations after major host switches or through constant variability in new host use. With phylogenetic and network analyses, Braga et al. show that variability in host use supports most butterfly diversification, while rare radiations can further boost diversity.

    • Mariana P. Braga
    • , Paulo R. Guimarães Jr
    •  & Niklas Janz

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