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Signing of peace agreements in Colombia has brought armed conflict to an end, but has also led to encroachment, development and deforestation of previously disputed forested areas, as revealed by remote sensing data.
In a coordinated distributed dispersal experiment involving seven laboratories, the authors show that both top-down predation risk and bottom-up resource limitation increase emigration rates across 21 species ranging from protozoa to vertebrates.
In the Western Ghats of India, the presence of wind farms is found to reduce the abundance and activity of predatory birds, with the associated effect of increasing the density of lizard prey and altering lizard behaviour and physiology.
Priority effects refer to changes in the diversity, composition or function of a community according to the arrival order of species. Here, the authors show that only effects that are compatible with coexistence theory are characterized by positive frequency-dependence.
How and why individuals of the same species may differ in the way they form pair bonds is not well understood. The authors show that the individual personalities of male great tits (Parus major) regulate how quickly they meet their future partner, and the rate at which they bond with them.
Whole genome data for 221 geo-referenced cultivated and wild accessions of pearl millet reveals their domestication centre in the western Sahara, 4,900 years ago.
More diverse plant communities show increasing productivity through time. Here, the authors show that evolutionary selection for facilitative interactions occurs only in mixtures, whereas selection for reduced competition occurs in both monocultures and mixtures.
Damselfish ‘farm' plots of algae through weeding, territorial defence and fertilization. Here, the authors show that some damselfish populations take advantage of natural CO2 vents to enhance their crop productivity and abundance.
Experimental removal of corallivorous snails from corals in the Caribbean Sea shows that this local management action can improve coral resilience to severe warming through reducing bleaching severity and post-bleaching tissue mortality.
An evidence map of global biodiversity loss research over the past decade suggests foci do not match predicted severity and impact, and that research and policy need to be realigned.
Laboratory experiments have shown evolutionary adaptation of phytoplankton to ocean acidification. Here, it is shown that this adaptation is masked in field conditions by pleiotropic effects.
Organic preserved biomarkers in specimens of Beltanelliformis reveal that these enigmatic members of the Ediacara biota were benthic colonial cyanobacteria.
Although New Caledonian crows are known to create hooked foraging tools in the wild, here the authors show that this allows them to forage more efficiently compared with when they use non-hooked tools.
Genome-wide nucleotide composition varies greatly among species. Here, the authors show that genomic G + C composition is driven by mutation bias but is also modified by natural selection or biased gene conversion.
Niche modelling and aDNA reveal increasing prevalence of black horses in post-glacial forests, suggesting they became increasingly adapted to these habitats.
Long-term grassland and forest experiments reveal that temporal strengthening in biodiversity functioning relationships is mainly driven by increases in functioning in high-diversity communities.
Despite recent IUCN downgrading of the giant panda’s conservation status from ‘endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’, new GIS and remote sensing data reveal panda habitats to cover less area and be more fragmented than previously.
Theory predicts that gene flow hinders local adaptation, unless it is coupled with habitat choice. Here, the authors show that dispersal with habitat choice favours local adaptation in ciliate microcosms.
Plants can induce anti-herbivore defences through the synthesis of proteins that reduce feeding. Induction of these defences in tomato plants also reduces herbivore damage by promoting cannibalism among insect larvae.