Ecology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    In wildlife tagging, stress from capture and handling can alter post- release behavior and potentially study interpretations. This study of 42 mammal species shows that these effects diminish within 4–7 days, and quicker for animals in high human activity areas indicating adaptation to disturbance.

    • Jonas Stiegler
    • , Cara A. Gallagher
    •  & Niels Blaum

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The expansion and intensification of agriculture has led to a loss of soil carbon. Here the authors show that increasing plant diversity within an agricultural soil increases positive associations within the soil microbial community, which increases carbon use efficiency.

    • Luiz A. Domeignoz-Horta
    • , Seraina L. Cappelli
    •  & Anna-Liisa Laine

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) is crucial for carbon storage, but its variability is difficult to capture due to inconsistent measurements and complex interactions. This perspective proposes integrating diverse data and models to improve CUE in carbon cycle models

    • Xianjin He
    • , Elsa Abs
    •  & Daniel S. Goll

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The Southern Ocean ecosystem is recovering from 20th-century industrial whaling, while the krill fishery in this region has grown rapidly and may expand further, driven by demand for supplements and aquaculture feed. This Perspective discusses how current krill biomass is unlikely to support both a growing krill fishery and rebounding whale populations in the Southern Ocean.

    • Matthew S. Savoca
    • , Mehr Kumar
    •  & Cassandra M. Brooks

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To address substrate inhibition in wastewater treatment, the authors propose a non-lethal high substrate environment to enhance microbial community resistance. Testing this on anammox systems, they find increased nitrite tolerance and stability, with a shift to the dominant genus Candidatus Jettenia.

    • Beiying Li
    • , Conghe Liu
    •  & Bin Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our knowledge of life in the Carboniferous Period is largely restricted to low-lying wetlands dated to 315–310 million years ago. Here, the authors present an older Lagerstätte on an alluvial fan 320–318 million years ago, preserving a diverse ecosystem of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and plant-insect interactions.

    • Richard J. Knecht
    • , Jacob S. Benner
    •  & Naomi E. Pierce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is a need for accurate models to predict disease dynamics by considering the interactions between environment and vector traits. This study finds that incorporating delayed phenotypic plasticity in mosquito traits significantly enhances the accuracy of dengue risk predictions.

    • Dominic P. Brass
    • , Christina A. Cobbold
    •  & Steven M. White

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Artificial selection is a promising way to improve microbial community functions. Here, Arias-Sánchez et al. evaluate a method inspired by genetic algorithms to select small bacterial communities of known species composition based on their degradation of an industrial pollutant.

    • Flor I. Arias-Sánchez
    • , Björn Vessman
    •  & Sara Mitri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dissecting the associations between exposure to environmental pollution and cancer risk remains crucial. Here, the authors evaluate the impact of air and water pollution on cancer incidence in China using a spatial evaluation system and show that most excess cancer cases occurred in areas with the highest level of co-pollution.

    • Jingmei Jiang
    • , Luwen Zhang
    •  & Chengyu Jiang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    High pathogenicity avian influenza virus has a wide host range and has been detected across a large geographic area. Here, the authors present evidence of spread to the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic regions, with signs of clinical infection and positive virus detection in birds and elephant seals.

    • Ashley C. Banyard
    • , Ashley Bennison
    •  & Joe James

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A 1.5-fold gap exists in green space cooling adaptation between cities in the Global South and North. Enhancing urban green space quality and quantity offers vast potential for improving outdoor cooling adaptation and reducing its global inequality.

    • Yuxiang Li
    • , Jens-Christian Svenning
    •  & Chi Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors compare the diversity of vascular plants found in community science observations and digitized herbarium specimens, finding that with only one-third the records, herbaria still capture more data by several metrics.

    • Isaac Eckert
    • , Anne Bruneau
    •  & Laura J. Pollock

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It’s unclear how fragmented habitats affect species coexistence in bacterial communities. Here, using microfluidic chip experiments and simulations, the authors find that fragmentation leads to more diverse ecological outcomes mostly due to underlying phenotypic variation in founder cells and their stochastic assembly.

    • Maxime Batsch
    • , Isaline Guex
    •  & Jan Roelof van der Meer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most mammals have a vertebral column that is divided into discrete anatomical regions, but these have homogenized in cetaceans. Here, the authors propose the “Nested Regions” hypothesis, showing that cetaceans did not lose their regionalization but instead repatterned it by adding regions in the tail to assist with axial-driven locomotion

    • Amandine Gillet
    • , Katrina E. Jones
    •  & Stephanie E. Pierce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors built a non-redundant catalogue of nearly 1 billion putative small proteins from the global microbiome as a publicly-available resource, and highlight how some highly prevalent and evolutionarily conserved sequences lack functional annotation.

    • Yiqian Duan
    • , Célio Dias Santos-Júnior
    •  & Luis Pedro Coelho

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this study, the authors use metagenomics to analyze sewage samples from five European cities over time and report enhanced detection of rare taxa through combined assembly methods, significant seasonal and geographical microbiome variations, and the potential to attribute microbial sequences to specific sources.

    • Ágnes Becsei
    • , Alessandro Fuschi
    •  & Patrick Munk

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anatomically modern humans dispersed through Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic. Here, the authors model this dispersal combining archaeological, paleoclimate, and palaeoecological data and investigating how these variables impacted human demographic processes.

    • Yaping Shao
    • , Christian Wegener
    •  & Gerd-Christian Weniger

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbial communities drive all biogeochemical processes on Earth through spatiotemporal resource partitioning. This study shows how a few mutations in an evolved community can result in niche-differentiated ecotypes, whose interplay synergistically improves productivity of the interacting community across sediment and groundwater subpopulations.

    • Jacob J. Valenzuela
    • , Selva Rupa Christinal Immanuel
    •  & Nitin S. Baliga

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Loss of peat through increased burning will have major impacts on the global carbon cycle. Here, the authors use pyrolysis combustion flow calorimetry to determine the temperature of maximum thermal decomposition (Tmax) of peats from different latitudes, and couple this to a botanical composition analysis.

    • Alastair J. Crawford
    • , Claire M. Belcher
    •  & Minna Väliranta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When malaria interventions are relaxed in high transmission settings, incidence often rebounds to pre-intervention levels. Here, the authors investigate the hypothesis that this rebound occurs when transmission intensity remains above a minimum threshold value, at which prevalence and strain diversity decrease sharply with further intervention.

    • Qi Zhan
    • , Qixin He
    •  & Mercedes Pascual

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using an autonomous underwater vehicle, this study presents an integrated biogeochemical and multiomic analysis of microbial eukaryotes from the North Atlantic Ocean. The work highlights diverse communities that shift through depth zones, with signatures of nutrient biomarkers changing across a coastal-offshore spatial gradient.

    • Natalie R. Cohen
    • , Arianna I. Krinos
    •  & Mak A. Saito

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The largest plant family, Asteraceae, forms an iconic component of many island floras. Here, the authors conduct a macroecological review, showing that Asteraceae have a truly global distribution on islands and are the most diverse plant family on oceanic islands.

    • Lizzie Roeble
    • , Koen J. van Benthem
    •  & Luis Valente

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors combine machine learning with phylogenetic modeling to assess the impact of 39 abiotic and biotic drivers on Cactaceae evolution. They suggest that cactus diversification was promoted by moderate, rather than extreme climates, as well as soil characteristics and plant size.

    • Jamie B. Thompson
    • , Tania Hernández-Hernández
    •  & Nicholas K. Priest

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Crop failures are potentially predictable much further in advance than previously thought possible. Using multiyear forecasts of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Anderson et al. show that crop failures can be predicted before the planting season even begins in some countries.

    • Weston Anderson
    • , Shraddhanand Shukla
    •  & Amy McNally

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Over half the world’s rivers dry periodically, yet little is known about the biological communities in dry riverbeds. This study examines biodiversity across 84 non-perennial rivers in 19 countries using DNA metabarcoding. It finds that nutrient availability, climate and biotic interactions influence the biodiversity of these dry environments.

    • Arnaud Foulquier
    • , Thibault Datry
    •  & Annamaria Zoppini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The record-breaking 2023 wildfire season in Canada ( ~ 15 Mha burned) was enabled by early snowmelt, drought, and extreme weather. It had profound impacts that included evacuation of >200 communities, millions exposed to hazardous smoke, and a strain on fire-fighting resources.

    • Piyush Jain
    • , Quinn E. Barber
    •  & Marc-André Parisien

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbial interactions of the honey bee gut microbiome are incompletely understood. Here, the authors report a reciprocal interaction between two core bacterial genera: Bifidobacterium aids in demethylation of the pectin backbone enabling its breakdown by Gilliamella; in return, Gilliamella shares digestion products.

    • Junbo Tang
    • , Wenlong Zuo
    •  & Xin Zhou

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study uses global datasets of marine prokaryotes to reveal that prokaryotic biomass varies by just under 3-fold across the global surface ocean, while metabolic activity increases by more than one order of magnitude from polar to tropical coastal and upwelling regions. The findings also suggest that shifts under climate change could lead to an increasingly microbial-dominated ocean.

    • Ryan F. Heneghan
    • , Jacinta Holloway-Brown
    •  & Eric D. Galbraith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study analyzes a global dataset of soil metagenomes to explore environmental drivers of growth potential, a fundamental aspect of bacterial life history. The authors show that growth potential, estimated from codon usage statistics, was highest in forested biomes and lowest in arid latitudes, which indicates that bacterial productivity generally reflects ecosystem productivity globally.

    • Ernest D. Osburn
    • , Steven G. McBride
    •  & Michael S. Strickland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Oil reservoirs host diverse microbial communities affecting energy production and carbon emissions. Here, the authors use metagenomics data to construct and characterize a catalogue of viral and prokaryotic genomes from 182 oil reservoirs world-wide, and further validate an ecological role of viruses in regulating the community structure of sulfate reducing microorganisms.

    • Liyun An
    • , Xinwu Liu
    •  & Xiao-Lei Wu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forest carbon source and sink processes may have contrasting climatic sensitivities. This analysis on 177 coniferous forest sites shows that carbon fluxes and wood formation are coupled but not fully synchronous at intra-annual scales, with peaks in cambial activity preceding those in photosynthesis and respiration.

    • Roberto Silvestro
    • , Maurizio Mencuccini
    •  & Sergio Rossi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Native core microbiomes are often neglected when developing synthetic microbial communities to support plant health and growth. Here, the authors show that native core microorganisms have greater potential to support plant growth than both native non-core and non-native microorganisms.

    • Yanyan Zhou
    • , Donghui Liu
    •  & Xiaogang Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The democratic peace hypothesis suggests that autocracies are more warlike than democracies. Here, the authors use evolutionary game theory to test this hypothesis across taxa, finding that democratic peace can emerge without the need for complex human institutions.

    • K. L. Hunt
    • , M. Patel
    •  & D. W. E. Sankey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The stability of newly emerged collective-level traits during an evolutionary transition in individuality under the ecological-scaffolding scenario is not fully explained. Here, the authors use a stochastic meta-population model and adaptive dynamics to show that evolutionary hysteresis supports this stability.

    • Guilhem Doulcier
    • , Peter Takacs
    •  & Pierrick Bourrat

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using 25 years of satellite data, this study presents evidence that phytoplankton biomass and bloom phenology in the West Antarctic Peninsula are significantly changing as a response to anthropogenic climate change. These findings raise important questions regarding the effect of these ecological changes on global carbon sequestration and Antarctic food webs in the future.

    • Afonso Ferreira
    • , Carlos R. B. Mendes
    •  & Ana C. Brito

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Methanogenic hydrocarbon degradation can be carried out by archaea either by coupling alkane oxidation directly to methanogenesis, or in syntrophic associations with bacteria. Here, the authors provide experimental evidence supporting that methanogenic degradation of hydrocarbons can also be mediated by syntrophic cooperation between archaeal partners.

    • Tiantian Yu
    • , Lin Fu
    •  & Fengping Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hinsley and colleagues explore trends in the global wildlife trade, developing a novel machine-learning approach to analyse patent filing related to important taxa from 1970 to 2020. They found higher per year increases in these taxa compared with background trends, giving insight into how wildlife-related businesses predict, adapt to and create market shifts. These results provide data to underpin proactive wildlife-trade management approaches.

    • A. Hinsley
    • , D. W. S. Challender
    •  & J. Wright

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Marine life depends on zooplankton like krill, but it’s uncertain how these species will respond to a warming ocean. This study of genome variation in the Northern krill uncovered many gene variants that could be crucial for environmental adaptation and support stock assessment under climate change.

    • Per Unneberg
    • , Mårten Larsson
    •  & Andreas Wallberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The roles of Asgard archaea in soil ecosystems are unclear. In this study, the authors report complete genomes and metatranscriptomic data of Asgard archaea that indicate a role in production and consumption of carbon compounds known to serve as substrates for methane production in wetland soils.

    • Luis E. Valentin-Alvarado
    • , Kathryn E. Appler
    •  & Jillian F. Banfield

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate change is likely to impact the circulation of many infectious diseases. Here, the authors characterize the impact of climatic and demographic factors on enterovirus disease transmission and project how changes in climate may impact future transmission.

    • Rachel E. Baker
    • , Wenchang Yang
    •  & Saki Takahashi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding microbial responses to climate warming is crucial for projecting permafrost carbon-climate feedback. Here, the authors reveal dual microbial roles in promoting both soil carbon release and stable soil carbon accrual under warming scenario.

    • Shuqi Qin
    • , Dianye Zhang
    •  & Yuanhe Yang

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