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Achieving inclusive and sustainable ocean economies, long-term climate resilience and effective biodiversity conservation requires urgent and strategic actions from local to global scales. We discuss fundamental changes that are needed to allow equitable policy across these three domains.
Pangenomics enables us to trace the evolutionary history of clades and offers new perspectives on sources of genomic variation and adaptation of organisms.
Long-term high-resolution data on social relationships, space use and microhabitat in a wild population of mice (Apodemus sylvaticus), accompanied by sampling of the gut microbiota, show that distinct sets of microorganisms dominate social and environmental transmission routes of microbiota. Microorganisms with low oxygen tolerance are more reliant on social transmission.
An analysis of nearly a quarter of a million forest plots finds that up to half of European forest biodiversity may be lost owing to climate change over the course of this century and provides tools to promote climate-resilient forests deep into the future.
Isotope analysis of human and faunal remains dated to the Later Stone Age reveals a substantial plant-based component to hunter-gatherer diets at the site of Taforalt, several millennia prior to the development of agriculture in the Levant, renewing the question of why agriculture did not develop contemporaneously in North Africa.
Species distribution modelling for 69 European tree species under current climate conditions and projected conditions to 2100 (in decadal steps) demonstrates that, for climate suitability to be maintained throughout a tree’s lifespan, many fewer tree species are available to forest managers than are currently used.
Pollution in urban areas causes higher rates of mutation than in unpolluted areas. This Perspective discusses the effects of these mutations on the health, evolutionary fitness and ecology of urban organisms.
Through genetic and molecular analyses of interspecific stigma–pollen interactions, the authors show that Brassicaceae plants use an integrated pollen discrimination system and a shared pollen rejection pathway to reject conspecific self-pollen and heterospecific pollen. This establishes a mechanistic link between self-incompatibility and speciation in this clade.
In an analysis of how biotic interactions regulate hominin evolutionary dynamics, the authors show that speciation is negatively related to species diversity in Australopithecus and Paranthropus, in the same way that it is in many other vertebrates, whereas the genus Homo is characterized by positive diversity-dependent speciation and negative diversity-dependent extinction.
Analysis of cell types and circuit design of the primary rod pathway in zebrafish suggests that this specialized downstream circuit for rod signalling has been established before the divergence of teleost fish and mammals.
A comparative transcriptomic analysis of eight tissue types in twenty bilaterian species reveals the long-lasting effects of genome duplication on the evolution of novel tissue-specific gene-expression patterns.
A transcriptomic analysis of 8 tissues across 20 bilaterian species reveals that ancestral gains of tissue-specific gene expression were closely associated with whole-genome duplications in vertebrates and the diversification of ancestral tissue types.
Forests are spatially and temporally dynamic, such that forest degradation is best quantified across whole landscapes and over the long term. The European Union’s forest degradation policy, which focuses on contemporary primary forest conversion to plantations, ignores other globally prevalent forestry practices that can flip forests into a degraded state.
Evolutionary biologists should be proud of recent progress in their broad field. We highlight some developments in fundamental questions and the applied use of evolution.
