Articles in 2023

Reconstructing river networks over the past 80 Ma reveals the role of Andean uplift in creating a dynamic habitat leading to increased fish species diversity in western Amazonia.

A comparative analysis of head-regeneration capacity across planarian species in a phylogenetic context reveals multiple Wnt-dependent transitions in head-regeneration ability and proposes Wnt functions in the reproductive system as possible evolutionary drivers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This study reveals the genomic architecture of indirect genetic effects (IGEs) in Arabidopsis thaliana and reconstructs the evolutionary history of alleles responsible for IGEs in Eurasian populations.

Taphonomic experiments and analyses of fossil feathers reveal that while fossil keratins (formerly known as α-keratins) found in fossil feathers are likely artefacts of fossilization, corneous β-proteins (formerly β-keratins) can survive moderate thermal damage and persist over hundreds of millions of years to inform understanding of feather evolution.

This study provides a cell atlas of the sea lamprey brain based on single-cell RNA-seq and in situ sequencing data and includes comparative analyses with other vertebrates that reveal key features of the ancestral vertebrate brain as well as traits that arose later in evolution.

Remote sensing often detects higher vegetation greenness for croplands than for forests, despite forests having a greater leaf area. This study shows that this is an artefact of shadows caused by forest structures and explores how to correct for this when interpreting global vegetation change data.

A systematic comparison of optical satellite data shows that vegetation resilience is broadly declining in many areas, despite the unreliability of resilience estimates in high biomass regions.

Translocation of pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) females and eggs from the Netherlands to Sweden facilitates adaptation to changing phenological conditions, highlighting the importance of dispersal as well as plasticity and standing genetic variation in evolutionary responses to environmental change.

Sampling the viromes of vertebrates, arthropods and plants on an island ecosystem shows that viral transmission between species is strongly affected by phylogeny but less affected by predator–prey relationships and that generalist viruses pose the greatest zoonotic risk.

Using aqueous microdroplets to study reactions in the reverse tricarboxylic acid cycle (rTCA), the authors show rapid carbon fixation through reductive carboxylation reactions at ambient temperature, without requiring enzymes or metal catalysts, suggesting that microdroplets might have facilitated a non-enzymatic version of the rTCA cycle in prebiotic carbon anabolism.

Multi-species occupancy modelling using camera-trap data from 725 sites across 20 North American cities shows how environmental and climate characteristics interact with species traits to influence the effects of urbanization on wildlife communities.