Macroecology articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    An analysis of the rate at which isotherms are shifting in mountain regions worldwide identifies 17 key regions with particularly high vertical isotherm shift velocities, and provides insight into how these shifts affect species ranges.

    • Wei-Ping Chan
    • , Jonathan Lenoir
    •  & Sheng-Feng Shen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An analysis of tree survival data from forest sites worldwide shows that in the tropics, rare tree species experience stronger stabilizing density dependence than common species, wheras no correlation of stabilizing density dependence and abundance exists in the temperate zone.

    • Lisa Hülsmann
    • , Ryan A. Chisholm
    •  & Florian Hartig

  • 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

    The prevalence of annual plants worldwide rises in response to hot-dry summers, year-to-year variations, and disturbances, potentially impacting the future of ecosystem services provided by perennials.

    • Tyler Poppenwimer
    • , Itay Mayrose
    •  & Niv DeMalach

  • Article |

    An analysis of 2,239 terrestrial vertebrate populations shows that they decline more slowly in protected areas than outside protected areas, but the benefits vary across vertebrate classes and depend on the regional context of the protected area.

    • A. Justin Nowakowski
    • , James I. Watling
    •  & Luke O. Frishkoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nearly 90% of global variation in species richness of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles is shown to be explained by the joint effects of climate and the geographic structure (area and isolation) of climate.

    • Marco Túlio P. Coelho
    • , Elisa Barreto
    •  & Catherine H. Graham

  • Article |

    A systematic census at 1,636 sites around Australia from 2008 to 2021 finds that more than 30% of shallow invertebrate species in cool latitudes exhibit a high extinction risk due to declining populations and oceanic barriers, but tropical coral species remain relatively stable.

    • Graham J. Edgar
    • , Rick D. Stuart-Smith
    •  & Amanda E. Bates

  • Article |

    Increasing variability of net biome production over recent decades may be due to climate change and points to destabilization of the carbon–climate system.

    • Marcos Fernández-Martínez
    • , Josep Peñuelas
    •  & Ivan A. Janssens

  • Article |

    A global field survey that analyses samples of soil from all continents identifies hotspots for soil nature conservation, and shows that different ecological dimensions of soil are associated with different priority areas for conservation.

    • Carlos A. Guerra
    • , Miguel Berdugo
    •  & Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo

  • Article |

    Interaction between climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions in insect abundance and species richness, which can be mitigated by nearby natural habitats in low-intensity agricultural settings.

    • Charlotte L. Outhwaite
    • , Peter McCann
    •  & Tim Newbold

  • Article |

    Human-generated noise and night lighting affect breeding habits and fitness in birds, implying that sensory pollutants must be considered alongside other environmental factors in assessing biodiversity conservation.

    • Masayuki Senzaki
    • , Jesse R. Barber
    •  & Clinton D. Francis

  • Article |

    Wildlife communities in human-managed ecosystems contain proportionally more species that share human pathogens, and at a higher abundance, than undisturbed habitats, suggesting that landscape transformation creates increasing opportunities for contact between humans and potential hosts of human disease.

    • Rory Gibb
    • , David W. Redding
    •  & Kate E. Jones

  • Article |

    Using annual projections of temperature and precipitation to estimate when species will be exposed to potentially harmful climate conditions reveals that disruption of ecological assemblages as a result of climate change will be abrupt and could start as early as the current decade.

    • Christopher H. Trisos
    • , Cory Merow
    •  & Alex L. Pigot

  • Letter |

    Comparisons across terrestrial and marine ectotherms reveal that marine species experience temperatures closer to their upper thermal limits, and that local extirpations related to warming are more common in the ocean.

    • Malin L. Pinsky
    • , Anne Maria Eikeset
    •  & Jennifer M. Sunday

  • Article |

    Analyses of the relationships between temperature, moisture and seven key plant functional traits across the tundra and over time show that community height increased with warming across all sites, whereas other traits lagged behind predicted rates of change.

    • Anne D. Bjorkman
    • , Isla H. Myers-Smith
    •  & Evan Weiher

  • 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

  • Article |

    Analyses of data from 137 forest plots across 20 European countries show that ectomycorrhizal fungal diversity is strongly influenced by environmental and host species factors and provide thresholds to inform ecosystem assessment tools

    • Sietse van der Linde
    • , Laura M. Suz
    •  & Martin I. Bidartondo

  • Letter |

    Assessment of the impact of armed conflict on large herbivores in Africa between 1946 and 2010 reveals that high conflict frequency is an important predictor of wildlife population declines.

    • Joshua H. Daskin
    •  & Robert M. Pringle

  • Letter |

    Analysis of a comprehensive database of mammalian host–virus relationships reveals that both the total number of viruses that infect a given species and the proportion likely to be zoonotic are predictable and that this enables identification of mammalian species and geographic locations where novel zoonoses are likely to be found.

    • Kevin J. Olival
    • , Parviez R. Hosseini
    •  & Peter Daszak

  • Letter |

    Depth-dependent patterns in ocean species diversity can be explained by latitudinal variations in energy availability, with shelf and upper-slope diversity increasing with thermal energy availability, and deep-sea diversity increasing with chemical energy availability; the discovery of these distinct patterns could help to guide the conservation and management of these remote ecosystems.

    • Skipton N. C. Woolley
    • , Derek P. Tittensor
    •  & Timothy D. O’Hara

  • Letter |

    Relatively rapid changes in island area, isolation and connectivity observed since the Last Glacial Maximum have had measurable effects on present-day biodiversity, with formerly larger and less well connected islands having a greater number of endemic species.

    • Patrick Weigelt
    • , Manuel Jonas Steinbauer
    •  & Holger Kreft

  • Article |

    How marine communities will respond to climate change depends on the thermal sensitivities of existing communities; existing reef communities do not show a perfect fit between current temperatures and the thermal niches of the species within them and this thermal bias is a major contributor to projected local species loss.

    • Rick D. Stuart-Smith
    • , Graham J. Edgar
    •  & Amanda E. Bates

  • Article |

    Net primary production is affected by temperature and precipitation, but whether this is a direct kinetic effect on plant metabolism or an indirect ecological effect mediated by changes in plant age, plant biomass or growing season length is unclear — this study develops metabolic scaling theory to be able to answer this question and applies it to a global data set of plant productivity, concluding that it is indirect effects that explain the influence of climate on productivity, which is characterized by a common scaling relationship across climate gradients.

    • Sean T. Michaletz
    • , Dongliang Cheng
    •  & Brian J. Enquist

  • Letter |

    Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an important and increasing component of marine conservation strategy, but their effectiveness is variable and debated; now a study has assembled data from a global sample of MPAs and demonstrates that effectiveness depends on five key properties: whether any fishing is allowed, enforcement levels, age, size and degree of isolation.

    • Graham J. Edgar
    • , Rick D. Stuart-Smith
    •  & Russell J. Thomson

  • Letter |

    Global reef fish diversity is studied with metrics incorporating species abundances and functional traits; these identify diversity hotspots corresponding to the diversity of functional traits amongst individuals in the community, and greater evenness in the abundance of reef fishes at higher latitudes, findings that contrast with patterns reported previously using traditional richness-based methods.

    • Rick D. Stuart-Smith
    • , Amanda E. Bates
    •  & Graham J. Edgar

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