Articles in 2021

Geospatial analysis of forest canopy damage in over half the area burned in the 2019–20 southeast Australian wildfires shows that spatial factors and weather determine burning severity much more than past logging and wildfire disturbance.

Nautilus, the sole surviving externally shelled cephalopod from the Palaeozoic, holds an important phylogenetic position to understand the evolution of cephalopods. A complete genome of Nautilus pompilius sheds light on the evolution of the pinhole eye and biomineralization.

The authors explore dental development in a stem-chondrichthyan ischnacanthid acanthodian to inform our understanding of the ancestral gnathostome dental condition, finding that although dermal oral tubercles are a conserved feature of early gnathostomes, the complex cyclic shedding dentitions and whorls appear to have evolved multiple times.

Males of the freshwater fish Poecilia parae occur as one of five morphs with different reproductive strategies that are controlled by five Y haplotypes. Analysis of Y chromosomes of the five morphs shows extreme diversity in the three major morphs despite constraints imposed by lack of recombination of sex chromosomes.

Combining a published dataset of stable carbon isotopes from herbivore tooth enamel with multidecadal Landsat estimates of C₃ woody cover across 30 African ecosystems, the authors show that there is little relationship between intrataxonomic variation in δ¹³C enamel and vegetation structure, leading them to recommend a community-level approach for making vegetation inferences.

A meta-analysis of 139 studies of diploid animals shows that they rarely avoid mating with kin, although the degree of relatedness and prior experience with kin do alter the effect size, and there is evidence of publication bias.

Tree spatial data, spatial statistics and dynamical theory reveal the relationship between spatial patterns and population-level interaction coefficients and their consequences for multispecies dynamics and coexistence.

A global assessment of the status of tropical cloud forests shows that they have declined overall by ~2.4% since 2001, with much of this occurring despite formal protection and with up to 8% loss in some regions.

Citizen-science data on bird observations from eastern North America show that the timing of spring arrival of migratory birds is broadly correlated with fluctuations in vegetation green-up but that the varying sensitivity of different bird species to this phenological event is linked to their different migratory strategies.

A predictive model of soil microbiome composition is tested against community surveys from across the United States, showing an increase in predictability with spatial scale when using both functional and taxonomic groups.

Despite the fact that large animals and microorganisms face different environmental and anthropogenic pressures, this study finds that marine biogeographic patterns are similar for organisms in different kingdoms.

A phylogenetic meta-analysis of patterns and drivers of body size evolution across a global sample of paired island–mainland populations of terrestrial vertebrates shows that ‘island rule’ effects are widespread in mammals, birds and reptiles, but less evident in amphibians, which mostly tend towards gigantism.

Adaptive therapies based on evolutionary principles propose that, under certain conditions, tumour containment, rather than elimination, might be the best strategy to treat cancer. This study presents a theoretical analysis of different models of tumour containment.

The species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric quantifies the contributions that abating threats and restoring habitats offer towards reducing species’ extinction risk in specific places.

The authors present the genome sequence of a >45,000-year-old female Homo sapiens individual from the site of Zlatý kůň, Czechia. Although radiometric dating of the human remains was inconclusive, the authors were able to use molecular methods to demonstrate that she was probably among the earliest Eurasian inhabitants following expansion out of Africa.

The genomes of 609 wild Caenorhabditis elegans strains isolated across the world reveal hyper-divergent regions, often shared among many wild strains, that are enriched for genes that mediate environmental response, which might have enabled the species to thrive in diverse environments.

The authors apply a Bayesian total evidence dating approach to a recent hominin phylogeny, estimating that the origin of Homo probably occurred 4.3–2.56 million years ago. Ancestral state reconstructions show the onset of a trend towards greater body mass with the origin of the genus and gradual but accelerating encephalization rates throughout hominin evolution.

Flexibility in interaction patterns could help species adapt to global change. Here the authors show that pollinators with higher interaction flexibility are more likely to colonize new patches in a landscape.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

The authors use economic input–output modelling to reveal how consumption patterns contribute to deforestation domestically and internationally across nations.