Articles in 2025

Environmental gradients in temperature and productivity jointly, yet asymmetrically, shape the structure and resilience of coral reef food webs, according to analysis of environmental DNA data from the South China Sea.

Ancient-style plate tectonics with warm subduction may have already existed in the Neoarchean, whereas modern-style plate tectonics featuring cold subduction appeared in the late Paleoproterozoic, according to metamorphic thermobaric ratio analysis of the North China Craton.

Supply chain digitalization reduces urban air pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions by up to 9 percent locally but increases them by 4 percent in nearby areas, according to an analysis that uses a quasi-natural experiment and a difference-in-differences method

Shoreline protuberance and well-developed distributary channels are enhanced by stronger fluvial influences and diminished by stronger wave influences, whereas tidal influences show a less clear relationship with these morphological features, according to machine learning analysis.

Effusive volcanism dominates at water depths of 300 m or greater while phreatomagmatic Surtseyan eruptions become prevalent at shallower depths, according to analyses of high-resolution seismic reflection profiles, multibeam bathymetry, and seafloor imagery.

The interactions between atmospheric rivers and large-scale climate teleconnections modulate the timing and magnitude of vegetation and fire responses across North America, according to remote sensing, teleconnection index, and reanalysis data analyses.

Microbial carbon use efficiency remains largely unaffected by nutrient additions, regardless of the overall amount or the specific type of nutrient applied, according to a global meta-analysis of 427 observations.

Redox potential pattern in the permafrost soil active layer showed large seasonal differences, with reducing conditions in the summer and autumn, and oxidizing conditions in winter and spring, according to three years of soil redox potential measurements, at three sites near Fairbanks, Alaska.

Increased irrigation water productivity, crop yields stabilization, mitigation of energy consumption and carbon emissions are possible using a high-resolution water-food energy-carbon optimization framework that integrates multi-source datasets and future crop distribution scenarios.

Enhanced species diversity promotes the allocation of resources to belowground biomass, accelerates seasonal carbon cycle, thereby reducing aboveground resource availability triggering earlier senescence, according to field observations from Northern China coupled with global remote sensing data.

Statistical causal inference shows that runoff efficiency in the Upper Colorado River Basin rises with higher precipitation and snow, accompanied by cooler springs and suppressed vegetation, and falls when precipitation and snow are lower and accompanied by warmer springs and enhanced vegetation.

Only 0.2–2.6% of synthesized biomass stays in live plants at the global scale, as revealed by biomass retention efficiency, a newly developed metric based on satellite data and ecosystem models.

Mesoscale eddies’ decay is accompanied by subsurface near-inertial wave generation, indicating direct energy transfer, according to remote sensing and in situ measurements.

Croplands in biodiversity hotspots expand rapidly from 2000 to 2019 at a rate above the global average, and more than half of conservation gaps are found within the hotspots, as revealed by site-level observations and satellite data.

Long-term trends in aerosol pollution events are dominated by anthropogenic forcing, increasing asynchronization between near-field transmission and wider teleconnections, according to analysis of extreme aerosol pollution event synchronization.

A wedge-shaped graben extension mechanism for the 2025 Dingri earthquake involved two graben-bounding faults, highlighting that early postseismic deformation is mainly driven by shallow afterslip and viscoelastic relaxation, with the afterslip spatially complementing coseismic slip, according to integration of field observations, geodetic and seismic data.

Mercury concentrations in sediments of the North American Arctic Margin and the Arctic Ocean basins can be entirely explained by carbon sources and cycling, according to analysis of sediment cores from the polar ocean.

A market-based nitrogen insurance lets maize farmers cut excess fertilizer use without profit risk, as shown in simulations across 4,270 Illinois fields over 30 years and 33 nitrogen rates.

Phosphorus addition alone reduces phosphorus-acquiring enzyme activities by 14%, while phosphorus combined with nitrogen addition boosts nitrogen-acquiring enzyme activities by 21%, according to a meta-analysis based on 155 field studies across various ecosystems.

In the drier loess soil, Gammaproteobacteria possess symbiotic nitrogen-fixing genes that promote microbial structural and functional succession over the ten-thousand-year scale and support a nitrogen fixation-comammox-nitrate reduction cycle, according to analysis of samples in Luochuan, China.