Reviews & Analysis

Zero-deforestation policies are reducing the loss of tropical rainforest to oil palm expansion, but spatial analyses indicate that this may cause unintended large-scale loss of biodiverse grasslands and dry forests unless protections are extended under certification agreements.

An analysis of 16 ecosystem services measured across sites in Europe shows that the supply of some services is predicted by plot-scale diversity, whereas others rely on intact habitats at the landscape scale, highlighting the importance of cross-scale management efforts to maintain ecosystem services.

Ecological syntheses are often assumed to identify generalities in effects, but this concept is rarely defined. Here, the authors review current practice in ecological synthesis and propose pathways to achieving generality.

Measurements of individual birds of 105 species across North America over almost twenty years reveal intraspecific trends of smaller body sizes towards the equator and of decreasing body size as average temperatures increase.

Plasmids are well known for transferring antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria. A study in the clinic shows that evolutionary dynamics within the gut microbiomes of hospitalized patients lead to rapid adaptive changes, balancing the level of resistance that plasmids provide against the fitness costs that they impose on bacteria.

In this Perspective, the authors demonstrate how concepts and models from landscape ecology and complex adaptive systems science can be used to explore the dynamics of mosquito-borne diseases in urban environments.

Two Palaeolithic genomes from Britain provide the oldest currently available genetic data from the region and appear to map on to wider European patterns of genetic ancestry and associated archaeology. However, with sparse samples and wide temporal gaps between them, it might be premature to draw wider conclusions about the consistency of these patterns.

Social cues are known to be involved in the timing of animal migrations. In this Review, the authors outline a framework for understanding the roles of different cues across temporal scales, and how these match with ecosystem dynamics.

A global comparison of plant trait patterns calculated using citizen science observations versus those calculated using traditional scientific data reveals remarkable congruence between the two approaches.

The effects of the redistribution of flora and fauna by European empires are still visible in global biodiversity today and can be traced through the distribution of introduced species. Attempts to solve today’s biodiversity crisis necessitates grappling these colonial legacies head on.

An innovative isotopic labelling strategy shows that malaria mosquitoes in the West-African Sahel region survive in dormancy over the prolonged dry season. These results have implications for efforts to suppress malaria transmission in Africa.

This Perspective discusses potential effects of ocean warming on human nutrition provision from coral reef fish, ranging from altered species compositions of fish populations through to changed fish nutrient profiles resulting from altered metabolism, microbiome composition and trophic interactions.

Fitness landscapes were described almost a century ago as smooth surfaces with peaks and valleys that are difficult to navigate. Now, more realistic high-dimensional genotype–phenotype maps show that fitness maxima can be reached from almost any other phenotype while avoiding fitness valleys, which are very rare.

Harnessing big data and machine learning provides an assessment of the extinction risks of palm species worldwide, and illustrates an integrative conservation planning approach that incorporates evolutionary and ecological distinctiveness as well as human use.

Many viruses evolve quickly, leading to the coexistence of multiple strains within the same host and population. In this Review, the authors synthesize ecological and evolutionary approaches to studying the dynamics of multi-strain RNA virus infections and suggest opportunities for future work.

Coevolutionary warfare between bacteria and phage results in the diversification of anti-phage CRISPR arrays among the most successful bacterial competitors

Cnidarians and ctenophores have morphologically simpler nervous systems than those of bilaterians. Discovery and characterization of neuropeptides in a comb jelly and a sea anemone support a common origin of animal peptidergic neurons from digestive cells that could sense their environment.

A large dataset of aquatic biodiversity across multiple trophic levels from several wetlands in Brazil reveals that biodiversity–multifunctionality relationships break down with human pressures.

A modelling study suggests that the proposed energetic barrier between prokaryotes and eukaryotes may not be relevant to the complexity gap between the two domains. The energetic advantage of early mitochondria was probably small, and eukaryotes likely emerged without the help of an endosymbiont.

Transmissible cancers are governed by the same evolutionary processes as asexually reproducing, unicellular organisms. This Review discusses population genetics processes that determine the evolution of clonally transmissible cancers.