Ecology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    This paper is a call to action. By publishing concurrently across journals like an emergency bulletin, we are not merely making a plea for awareness about climate change. Instead, we are demanding immediate, tangible steps that harness the power of microbiology and the expertise of researchers and policymakers to safeguard the planet for future generations.

    • Raquel Peixoto
    • , Christian R. Voolstra
    •  & Jack A. Gilbert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors detect clade 2.3.4.4b H5N1 viruses in elephant seals associated with a mass mortality event in Argentina, show that the viruses belong to a clade primarily seen in marine mammals in South America and that they carry mammal-adaptation mutations suggestive of potential mammal-to-mammal transmission.

    • Marcela M. Uhart
    • , Ralph E. T. Vanstreels
    •  & Agustina Rimondi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High salinities are thought to inhibit nitrogen fixation by cyanobacteria in coastal waters. In contrast, Tang et al. show that nitrogen fixation in a coastal cyanobacterium requires sodium ions and is apparently driven by sodium energetics and mixed-acid fermentation.

    • Si Tang
    • , Xueyu Cheng
    •  & Zhonghua Cai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Freshwater snails are the intermediate host of schistosomes, playing an important role in transmission. Here, the authors provide a detailed analysis of water contacts and other human-environmental variables in 38 villages in Uganda and provide profiles of at risk groups.

    • Fabian Reitzug
    • , Narcis B. Kabatereine
    •  & Goylette F. Chami

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that vegetation models commonly underestimate the productivity of West African forests, owing to bias in fractional absorbed photosynthetic radiation (fAPAR) and leaf level photosynthetic capacities.

    • Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng
    • , Xiongjie Deng
    •  & Yadvinder Malhi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Few aerobic hyperthermophilic microorganisms are known to degrade polysaccharides. Here, Nou et al. use genomic information to enrich and optical tweezers to isolate an aerobic hyperthermophilic bacterium that can grow at 65–87.5 °C using polysaccharides as sole carbon sources.

    • Nancy O. Nou
    • , Jonathan K. Covington
    •  & Brian P. Hedlund

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soil microbial growth controls carbon sequestration. Here, the authors show that resource-rich, neutral soils from cold and humid areas have higher growth potential than resource-poor, hypersaline soil from dry and hot regions, demonstrating diverse microbial adaptations.

    • Zhenghu Zhou
    • , Chuankuan Wang
    •  & Chengjie Ren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Biogeographic regions reflect the organization of biotas over long evolutionary timescales. Here the authors show that climate change will lead to the persistence of some biogeographic regions and alteration of deeper biogeographic boundaries that separate historically distinctive plant assemblages.

    • Samuel Minev-Benzecry
    •  & Barnabas H. Daru

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global warming may widen the development gap between the Global South and North by increasing inequalities in forest carbon and nitrogen cycling. High-income countries are expected to benefit from forest assets, while others face net losses.

    • Jinglan Cui
    • , Ouping Deng
    •  & Baojing Gu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Studies of species interactions tend to focus on single ecological functions. Here, the authors show that plant species tend to participate across different ecological functions in a non-random, nested structure, and some species and functions emerge as unexpected keystone actors of the multifunctional ecosystem.

    • Sandra Hervías-Parejo
    • , Mar Cuevas-Blanco
    •  & Victor M. Eguíluz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate warming causes earlier spring phenological events and higher risk of late spring frost damage. Here, the authors investigate the impact of late spring frosts on phenological events, finding that they delayed flowering by an average of 6 days across 640 species.

    • Haoyu Qiu
    • , Qin Yan
    •  & Lei Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Atlantic herring has four megabase-sized inversions associated with ecological adaptation. This study untangles their evolutionary history, showing that considerable genetic exchange between alleles has occurred and that effective purifying selection has prevented the accumulation of genetic load.

    • Minal Jamsandekar
    • , Mafalda S. Ferreira
    •  & Leif Andersson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Trapped in rock fractures miles below the surface are saline waters that have been isolated for millions of years. In these most remote environments exists an active turnover of dissolved organic molecules, an active carbon cycle.

    • Elliott P. Mueller
    • , Juliann Panehal
    •  & Alex L. Sessions

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Motility coupled with responsive behavior is essential for microorganisms to establish suitable habitats, with simple responses like reversing motion enabling them to form stable aggregates. Kurjahn et al. show that filamentous cyanobacteria use light gradients and boundary curvature of light stimuli to form ordered, entangled aggregates, revealing how these dynamics could influence adaptive colony architectures.

    • Maximilian Kurjahn
    • , Leila Abbaspour
    •  & Stefan Karpitschka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pesticides must be evaluated for their exposure to honey bees across diverse landscapes. This study reveals that both agricultural lands and urban areas resulted in higher pesticide exposure of bees, whereas forests were considered pesticide mitigation areas.

    • Shumpei Hisamoto
    • , Makihiko Ikegami
    •  & Yoshiko Sakamoto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this study, the authors show that the placement of protected areas is globally highly heterogenous but can be accurately predicted from a reduced set of socioeconomic and environmental factors. These predictions highlight that most unprotected areas critical for the conservation of vertebrates are located in unfavourable conditions to establish future protected areas.

    • David Mouillot
    • , Laure Velez
    •  & Wilfried Thuiller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Spillover of avian influenza H5N1 from birds to mammals have been increasingly detected, but reports of cases in humans remain limited. Here, the authors find serological evidence of human exposure to influenza H5N1 in Malaysian Borneo, an important stopover site for migratory shorebirds.

    • Hannah Klim
    • , Timothy William
    •  & Kimberly M. Fornace

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree functional strategies regulate responses to water stress, but how these strategies scale up to the forest community level is not well known. This study shows coherent spatial variation in community-level trait associations across temperate forests that is linked to temperature.

    • Daijun Liu
    • , Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert
    •  & Thomas A. M. Pugh

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    One of the main themes of the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity is Digital Sequence Information (DSI): genomic or related data deposited in publicly accessible databases in a digital language. These sequences are important for research in areas such as biodiversity conservation and bioprospecting. Some characteristics of organisms that stimulate the commercial use of biodiversity may have been developed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, and therefore, they have associated traditional knowledge. We present proposals of the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities on this topic.

    • Adriana de Souza de Lima
    • , Cristiane Gomes Julião
    •  & Gustavo Taboada Soldati

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes and viruses inhabit the subseafloor crust beneath hydrothermal vents. Here the authors show that vent endemic animals such as giant tubeworms also live in vent subseafloor cavities, implicating subseafloor dispersal of vent larvae and the need to protect seafloor and subseafloor vent habitats.

    • Monika Bright
    • , Sabine Gollner
    •  & Alex Paris

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The significance of biofluorescence across taxonomic groups is understudied. Here the authors document biofluorescence in South American tropical amphibians, suggesting that biofluorescence corresponds with wavelengths of light at twilight and may be used in communication.

    • Courtney Whitcher
    • , Santiago R. Ron
    •  & Emily Moriarty Lemmon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Explainable Artificial Intelligence can improve conservation decisions by revealing hidden insights to where human impacts on biodiversity are greatest. In this investigation of freshwater fish in Switzerland, around 90% of potentially habitable areas were negatively impacted human influences - these areas form the species’ “shadow distribution”.

    • Conor Waldock
    • , Bernhard Wegscheider
    •  & Ole Seehausen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine heatwaves can have severe impact on corals populations. This study demonstrates that selective breeding could quickly enhance coral tolerance to short-term heat stress by up to 1 °C. This has potential to mitigate some impacts of climate change, however urgent climate action is still needed.

    • Adriana Humanes
    • , Liam Lachs
    •  & James R. Guest

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conservation agriculture is promoted as a sustainable solution in the changing climate, but its response to warming is unclear. Here, the authors report that conservation agriculture improves soil health and sustains crop yields under long-term warming compared to conventional agriculture.

    • Jialing Teng
    • , Ruixing Hou
    •  & Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Identifying pairs of genotypes that perform better in mixture than monoculture is important for increasing crop yields. Using the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, this study provides a proof of principle of how such beneficial genotype pairs could be found using genome-wide association studies.

    • Yasuhiro Sato
    • , Rie Shimizu-Inatsugi
    •  & Kentaro K. Shimizu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors characterize over 100 community samples and over 100 individual strains isolated from historical and modern traditional Swiss cheese starter cultures, showing imprints of millennia-long human domestication, notably stable phenotypic traits, low species and genomic diversity and genomic decay associated with reduction of niche breadth.

    • Vincent Somerville
    • , Nadine Thierer
    •  & Philipp Engel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The dynamic intertides, located between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, serve as a favorable habitat for exploring virus-host relationships. Here, the authors recover 20,102 viral OTUs from twelve intertidal zones along the Chinese coasts, with further analyses expanding our understanding of intertidal viromes within an ecological framework.

    • Mengzhi Ji
    • , Jiayin Zhou
    •  & Qichao Tu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tree diversity can enhance carbon and nitrogen sequestration in both biomass and soils, but its effects across different environmental conditions remain unclear. This study shows that promoting tree functional diversity can increase carbon and nitrogen accumulation more in resource-rich environments.

    • Xinli Chen
    • , Peter B. Reich
    •  & Scott X. Chang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mass extinctions have repeatedly restructured communities through geological time, but biotic interactions are rarely considered in investigations of extinction dynamics and ecosystem recovery. Here the authors present evidence that secondary extinction cascades were important during a Jurassic hyperthermal extinction event and that it took over 7 million years for community structure to fully recover.

    • Alexander M. Dunhill
    • , Karolina Zarzyczny
    •  & Andrew P. Beckerman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The palaeoenvironmental context for early hominins in northern Africa during the Plio-Pleistocene transition is poorly documented. Here, the authors present multiproxy palaeoecological evidence for heterogeneous open grasslands, forested areas, wetlands, and seasonal aridity from Guefaït-4.2 in Morocco.

    • Iván Ramírez-Pedraza
    • , Carlos Tornero
    •  & Robert Sala-Ramos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Evolution often occurs within complex communities, but the way this context controls the rate and impact of evolution is poorly understood. The authors employ a model of resource competition to study evolution in a newly formed community, finding that established strains can still diversify further.

    • John McEnany
    •  & Benjamin H. Good

  • Article
    | Open Access

    P. falciparum and vivax are responsible for most cases of malaria but are not genetically closely related and differ in their clinical and epidemiological impacts. In this study, the authors investigate the genomic and epidemiological characteristics of the two parasites in a co-endemic setting of Guyana.

    • Philipp Schwabl
    • , Flavia Camponovo
    •  & Daniel E. Neafsey

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Ecosystem services such as pollination and biocontrol are affected by increasing plastic pollution with potential implications for food security. Here the authors synthesize the little known effects of nano- and microplastics on pollinators and biocontrol agents at the organismal, farm and landscape scale.

    • Dong Sheng
    • , Siyuan Jing
    •  & Thomas C. Wanger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The environmental drivers of species diversity at the global level are difficult to define. This paper, using standardised methodologies, shows that the seasonality of primary production explains marine pioneer metazoan richness comparatively or better than other measures like sea surface temperature.

    • Matteo Cecchetto
    • , Agnès Dettai
    •  & Stefano Schiaparelli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ability of protected areas to prevent biodiversity loss is still unclear. Here, the authors assess 160,000 protected areas, finding that while larger areas with stricter protections effectively reduced habitat loss, most areas still were not preventing deforestation or conversion to agricultural land.

    • Guangdong Li
    • , Chuanglin Fang
    •  & Jianguo Liu

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Ecology across other nature.com journals