Ecosystem ecology articles within Nature

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  • Analysis
    | Open Access

    Analyses of drivers of water stress are used to predict likely trajectories of the Amazon forest system and suggests potential actions that could prevent system collapse.

    • Bernardo M. Flores
    • , Encarni Montoya
    •  & Marina Hirota

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conversion of rainforest to plantations in Sumatra leads to higher energetic losses in animal food webs aboveground than belowground, with the belowground energy being reallocated from diverse arthropod communities to invasive earthworms.

    • Anton M. Potapov
    • , Jochen Drescher
    •  & Stefan Scheu

  • Article |

    Sea otters recolonizing an estuary in California indirectly reduce erosion by reducing burrowing crab abundance, suggesting that restoring predators could be a key mechanism to improve the stability of coastal wetlands and other ecosystems.

    • Brent B. Hughes
    • , Kathryn M. Beheshti
    •  & Brian R. Silliman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.

    • Declan L. M. Cooper
    • , Simon L. Lewis
    •  & Stanford Zent

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A spatially explicit global estimate reveals that land–water connections are important for regulating methane supply to running waters, and that these connections are vulnerable to both climate change and direct human modifications of the land.

    • Gerard Rocher-Ros
    • , Emily H. Stanley
    •  & Ryan A. Sponseller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A global assessment shows that the wildland–urban interface occurs on all continents, showing its broad-scale patterns and providing a basis for future research on dynamics and socioeconomic and biophysical processes.

    • Franz Schug
    • , Avi Bar-Massada
    •  & Volker C. Radeloff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A large-scale, five-year study in Indonesia finds that enriching oil palm-dominated landscapes with patches of trees bolsters biodiversity and ecosystem functioning without impairing oil palm yields but should not replace forest protection.

    • Delphine Clara Zemp
    • , Nathaly Guerrero-Ramirez
    •  & Holger Kreft

  • Article |

    Analysis of satellite-based data on recovering degraded and secondary forests in three tropical moist forest regions quantifies the amount of aboveground carbon accumulated, which counterbalanced one quarter of carbon emissions from old-growth forest loss between 1984 and 2018.

    • Viola H. A. Heinrich
    • , Christelle Vancutsem
    •  & Luiz E. O. C. Aragão

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Satellite observations reveal global increases in the extent and frequency of phytoplankton blooms between 2003 and 2020 and provide insights into the relationship between blooms, ocean circulation and sea surface temperature.

    • Yanhui Dai
    • , Shangbo Yang
    •  & Lian Feng

  • Review Article |

    A review of current river ecosystem metabolism research quantifies the organic and inorganic carbon flux from land to global rivers and demonstrates that the carbon balance can be influenced by a changing world.

    • Tom J. Battin
    • , Ronny Lauerwald
    •  & Pierre Regnier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Logged forests in Borneo have higher energy flow from vegetation to and broad range of bird and mammal species relative to old-growth forests and oil palm plantations, showing that they can be diverse and ecologically vibrant ecosystems.

    • Yadvinder Malhi
    • , Terhi Riutta
    •  & Matthew J. Struebig

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Global Ecosystem Typology has been developed to provide a systematic framework for data on all of Earth’s ecosystems in a unified theoretical context to support biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.

    • David A. Keith
    • , José R. Ferrer-Paris
    •  & Richard T. Kingsford

  • Article |

    Using a large-scale fishery dataset in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a pervasive pattern of increased pelagic predator catch inside anticyclonic eddies relative to cyclones and non-eddy areas is shown.

    • Martin C. Arostegui
    • , Peter Gaube
    •  & Camrin D. Braun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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.

    • Paul J. Blanchfield
    • , John W. M. Rudd
    •  & Michael T. Tate

  • Article
    | Open Access

    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.

    • Mirco Migliavacca
    • , Talie Musavi
    •  & Markus Reichstein

  • Article |

    Analysis of temperate lakes finds a widespread decline in dissolved oxygen concentrations in surface and deep waters, which is associated with reduced solubility at warmer surface water temperatures and increased stratification at depth.

    • Stephen F. Jane
    • , Gretchen J. A. Hansen
    •  & Kevin C. Rose

  • Article |

    A synthesis of elevated carbon dioxide experiments reveals that when plant biomass is strongly stimulated by elevated carbon dioxide levels, soil carbon storage declines, and where biomass is weakly stimulated, soil carbon accumulates.

    • C. Terrer
    • , R. P. Phillips
    •  & R. B. Jackson

  • Article |

    When tropical forest soils are warmed in situ, they release more CO2 than predicted by theory, creating a potentially substantial positive feedback to climate change.

    • Andrew T. Nottingham
    • , Patrick Meir
    •  & Benjamin L. Turner

  • Article |

    Carbon dioxide enrichment of a mature forest resulted in the emission of the excess carbon back into the atmosphere via enhanced ecosystem respiration, suggesting that mature forests may be limited in their capacity to mitigate climate change.

    • Mingkai Jiang
    • , Belinda E. Medlyn
    •  & David S. Ellsworth

  • Letter |

    Wilderness areas with minimal levels of human disturbance promote the persistence of biodiversity by acting as buffers against species loss, and therefore represent key targets for environmental protection.

    • Moreno Di Marco
    • , Simon Ferrier
    •  & James E. M. Watson

  • Letter |

    Soil radiocarbon dating reveals that combusted ‘legacy carbon’—soil carbon that escaped burning during previous fires—could shift the carbon balance of boreal ecosystems, resulting in a positive climate feedback.

    • Xanthe J. Walker
    • , Jennifer L. Baltzer
    •  & Michelle C. Mack

  • Letter |

    A regional-scale shift in the relationships between adult stock and recruitment of corals occurred along the Great Barrier Reef, following mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 caused by global warming.

    • Terry P. Hughes
    • , James T. Kerry
    •  & Rachael M. Woods

  • Review Article |

    The immense biodiversity of tropical ecosystems is threatened by multiple interacting local and global stressors that can only be addressed by the concerted efforts of grassroots organizations, researchers, national governments and the international community.

    • Jos Barlow
    • , Filipe França
    •  & Nicholas A. J. Graham

  • Letter |

    Fish and invertebrate communities transformed across the span of the Great Barrier Reef following the 2016 bleaching event due to a decline in coral-feeding fishes resulting from coral loss, and because of different regional responses of key trophic groups to the direct effect of temperature.

    • Rick D. Stuart-Smith
    • , Christopher J. Brown
    •  & Graham J. Edgar

  • Letter |

    This study of whole-soil carbon dynamics finds that, of the atmospheric carbon that is incorporated into the topmost metre of soil over 50 years, just 19 per cent reaches the subsoil, in a manner that depends on land use and aridity.

    • Jérôme Balesdent
    • , Isabelle Basile-Doelsch
    •  & Christine Hatté

  • Perspective |

    The current and expected environmental consequences of built dams and proposed dam constructions in the Amazon basin are explored with the help of a Dam Environmental Vulnerability Index.

    • Edgardo M. Latrubesse
    • , Eugenio Y. Arima
    •  & Jose C. Stevaux

  • Letter |

    Examination of the ecosystem properties of treeline ecotones in seven temperate regions of the world shows that the reduction in temperature with increasing elevation does not affect tree leaf nutrient concentrations, but does reduce ground-layer community-weighted plant nitrogen levels, leading to a strong stoichiometric convergence of ground-layer plant community nitrogen to phosphorus ratios across all regions.

    • Jordan R. Mayor
    • , Nathan J. Sanders
    •  & David A. Wardle

  • Letter |

    Empirically validated mathematical models show that a combination of intraspecific competition between subterranean social-insect colonies and scale-dependent feedbacks between plants can explain the spatially periodic vegetation patterns observed in many landscapes, such as the Namib Desert ‘fairy circles’.

    • Corina E. Tarnita
    • , Juan A. Bonachela
    •  & Robert M. Pringle

  • Letter |

    Climate models require an understanding of ecosystem-scale respiration and photosynthesis, yet there is no way of measuring these two fluxes directly; here, new instrumentation is used to determine these fluxes in a temperate forest, showing, for instance, that respiration is less during the day than at night.

    • R. Wehr
    • , J. W. Munger
    •  & S. R. Saleska

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Douglas C. Morton
    • , Jyoteshwar Nagol
    •  & Peter R. J. North

  • Letter |

    Vocalizations were recorded for over eight distinct whale species as they converged on a shoal of herring to feed; the predators divided the shoal into overlapping but species-specific foraging sectors and the activities of the whales changed between day and night.

    • Delin Wang
    • , Heriberto Garcia
    •  & Purnima Ratilal

  • Letter |

    Using satellite data and a novel analytical approach, a new index of the sensitivity of vegetation to climate variability is developed, revealing areas of high sensitivity that include tundra, boreal forest, tropical forest and temperate grasslands.

    • Alistair W. R. Seddon
    • , Marc Macias-Fauria
    •  & Kathy J. Willis

  • Letter |

    An analysis of above-ground biomass recovery during secondary succession in forest sites and plots, covering the major environmental gradients in the Neotropics.

    • Lourens Poorter
    • , Frans Bongers
    •  & Danaë M. A. Rozendaal

  • Article |

    The authors found that the key elements of plant form and function, analysed at global scale, are largely concentrated into a two-dimensional plane indexed by the size of whole plants and organs on the one hand, and the construction costs for photosynthetic leaf area, on the other.

    • Sandra Díaz
    • , Jens Kattge
    •  & Lucas D. Gorné

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