Articles in 2023

Combining transcriptomics, mathematical modelling and in vivo gene editing, this study shows that Sfrp2 contributes to stripe formation and hair colour in the African striped mouse.

Catastrophic flooding caused by an extreme hurricane offered a rare natural experiment monitoring recolonization of host plants by a herbivorous predator, in which the authors found that spatial sorting is responsible for the rapid and persistent evolution of dispersal and feeding traits in the red-shouldered soapberry bug.

Participants in the Convention on Biological Diversity’s processes for implementing the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework need clarity on what makes biodiversity information useful to national decision-makers. Here we present seven preconditions of useful biodiversity information and describe how these can be supported through regional support centres and south–south cooperation.

We examined the interactive effects of temperature and the presence of apex fish predators on food web structure in Icelandic geothermal streams. Fish suppressed the biomass of invertebrates and thus released algae from grazing pressure, but only at higher temperatures, which illustrates how the combination of warming and apex predators triggers this trophic cascade.

Using a bioenergetic model and manipulative field experiment along a natural stream temperature gradient, the authors identify a temperature-induced trophic cascade where the presence of fish increases algal biomass and reduces decomposition, but only under warming.

Small-bodied faunivory has been proposed as the ancestral condition of most major synapsid clades, but here using a time-calibrated metatree of 1,888 fossil synapsids, the authors show that while faunivory is commonly ancestral, small body size in radiation forerunners is a relatively late innovation, arising in the Late Triassic.

Biodiversity directly and indirectly contributes to all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Making meaningful progress towards achieving these goals in the next seven years will require embracing their interdependencies.

Inspired by systems biology, a statistical model now shows that low-order ecological interactions — which are inferable from relatively limited species-presence datasets — can successfully predict functional performance across synthetic microcosms.

Fire activity and deforestation accelerated in Remote Oceania following human settlement. However, geoarchaeology and palaeoecology indicate that peak fire activity and grassland expansion primarily coincided with high frequencies of El Niño droughts, which suggests that there are complex relationships among human land use, fire and climate in the western Pacific.

This year marks the mid-point for the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including Sustainable Development Goal 14 (‘Life below water’). We asked a range of researchers working across marine science, conservation, policy and implementation to reflect on priorities for action on ocean health and biodiversity over the next seven years.

This year marks the mid-point for the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including Sustainable Development Goal 15 ‘Life on land’. We asked a range of researchers, working across biodiversity science, conservation, policy and implementation, to reflect on priorities for action on conserving terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems over the next seven years.

Landscapes of microbial community function inferred statistically from a broad range of datasets can predict community function on the basis on presence and absence data, without the need for abundance dynamics or interaction data.

Palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological reconstructions from Fiji suggest that the dramatic environmental transformations that followed human settlement of Remote Oceanian islands are the product of interactions between human activity and climate rather than human activity alone.

An experiment that simulates rainfall events in dry soils reveals that virus members of the soil microbiome maintain the turnover of prokaryotic host communities through a ‘cull-the-winner’ model.

Using a deep learning approach, the authors outline a global canopy height map at 10-m resolution combining publicly available optical satellite images and space-borne LiDAR and show that only 5% of the global landmass is covered by trees taller than 30 m.

Characterizing the responses of viral, prokaryotic and relic DNA dynamics to simulated precipitation on dry grassland soils, the authors show that soil viral communities follow remarkably similar successional patterns, despite large differences in composition.

Data from 5,525 in-water reef fish surveys conducted between 1- and 30-m depth reveal predictable depth-dependent zonation across the Pacific Ocean, particularly in the absence of a local human population. By contrast, relationships between depth and biomass were reduced or absent at populated islands, which suggests a human impact on depth-dependent ecological organization.

Analysis of tropical reef fish communities across 35 Pacific islands identifies predictable energetic resource-driven relationships between depth and biomass of different trophic groups of fish on reefs without local human impacts, but changes in these relationships for human-populated islands.