Search

Vegetation productivity resilience to fast and slow developing droughts remains poorly understood. This study reports lower resilience, greater sensitivity, and weaker CO₂ fertilization effects under flash drought, indicating limited ecosystem resilience.

A dated phylogeny of 16,585 vascular plant species native to China reveals three major centres of endemism, including a potential new global biodiversity hotspot.

Protected areas (PAs) are central to China’s forest conservation strategy, yet their carbon storage effectiveness under different governance and management contexts remains uncertain. Here, authors show that stronger protection enables substantially greater forest carbon gains in China’s PAs, both now and in the future.

Soil microbes recycle nutrients, but their global nutrient use efficiency is poorly understood. This study finds microbial nitrogen-use efficiency is nearly twice phosphorus-use efficiency, driven by soil carbon content, and is lowest in tundra and boreal forests.

Compiling data on floral introductions and European colonial history of regions worldwide, the authors find that compositional similarity of floras is higher than expected among regions once occupied by the same empire and similarity increases with the length of time the region was occupied by that empire.

Soil fauna is an important but often neglected component of terrestrial food webs. Here the authors use a large dataset of stable isotope observations to analyse how soil animal trophic diversity varies across climates and land-use types and identify potential biotic mechanisms.

The bacterial-to-fungal richness ratio serves as a unified, scalable indicator of microbial balance, soil health and ecological susceptibility, derived from spatial analysis, deep autoencoders, and structural equation modelling of Australian soil microbiomes.

Ship-based surveys show a very low occurrence of pelagic fish north of 82°N in the Central Arctic Ocean. The vulnerability of this largely undisturbed ecosystem needs to be considered, as declining sea ice may enable increased shipping, tourism and resource use.

The Amazon faces worsening droughts, yet little is known about large-scale variation in the physiological limits of Amazon trees. Here, the authors reveal family-level conservatism in embolism resistance and estimate that Brazilian and Guiana shield forests are more resistant than Western Amazonia forests.

Bees are crucial for the maintenance of healthy ecosystems, yet rigorous estimates of their species’ richness are lacking. This study estimates taxonomic gaps for bees around the world and provides a standardised method for occurrence data.

Meteorological drought cascades into soil and ecological droughts, which disproportionately amplify ecohydrological damage to 162–310% of initial intensity, according to global remote sensing, observational, and reanalysis data.

Urban ecology traditionally focuses on single cities, yet cities play key roles in ecological processes such as migration. Radar analysis across the continental USA reveals that nearly half of stopover hotspots concentrate in metropolitan areas, linked to urbanization.

Critical life-history traits, like growth and body size, can influence species’ survival. Using more than 7500 observations, this study suggests that the growth performance of marine fish has declined by 9% over the past century as a result of commercial size-based harvesting.

A comparative analysis of trait data combined with a mathematical model suggests that dietary specialization drives selection towards the smallest and largest body sizes in terrestrial mammals, as generalists outcompete specialists at intermediate sizes.

This study finds that native tree extinctions and alien naturalizations are pushing forests towards fast-growing, resource-demanding species. This global shift could affect carbon storage and ecosystem stability, highlighting the need to protect slow-growing trees.

Niche conservatism is a key assumption when planning non-native species management, but it is not always met. This study suggests that regional differences in niche conservatism are primarily transient and thus a matter of time.

This study examines long-term changes in species richness across tropical forests in the Andes and Amazon. Hotter, drier and more seasonal forests in the eastern and southern Amazon are losing species, while Northern Andean forests are accumulating species, acting as a refuge for climate-displaced species.

Changing fire regimes, leading to higher likelihood of high severity fire, are having unknown impacts on biodiversity. This study identifies regions of high avian biodiversity and individual bird species predicted to be highly exposed to future high severity.

Plant traits drive ecosystem dynamics yet are challenging to map globally due to sparse measurements. Here, the authors combine crowdsourced biodiversity observations with Earth observation data to accurately map 31 plant traits at 1 km² resolution.

Modelling nonlinear habitat dynamics shows that delayed compensation of human impacts (‘no net loss’) will lead to biodiversity declines by the middle of the century. Instead, the authors recommend fixed targets (such as ‘zero loss’) as part of the post-2020 biodiversity framework.

Insects are crucial for ecosystem functioning but face multiple threats, including invasive alien species. Here the authors quantify impacts of invasive alien species on four insect orders, with effects varying by insect group and type of invader.

There has been recent interest in understanding why the biodiversity-productivity relationship varies among studies and across scales. Here Fei et al. show that climatic variation drives forest biodiversity-productivity relationships at large spatial scales, whilst biotic and abiotic factors are important in given climate units.

Extinction after habit loss does not occur immediately. Here, the authors develop a model and estimate how fast extinction debt is paid off after habit loss, and show a temporal profile of species diversity decays in a power-law fashion with a half-life increasing slowly with habit size and area.

Although marine protected areas are designed to conserve biodiversity, they typically do not account for the conservation status of species within them. Here, the authors identify hotspots of extinction risk among the world’s sharks and rays that require targeted conservation action.

How landscapes are arranged affects soil pathogenic fungi worldwide. The authors reveal the global pattern and pronounced scale-dependency of landscape complexity and land-cover quantity on soil pathogenic fungal diversity.

Across a global dataset of over 11,000 naturalized alien plant species, the authors find that species are likely to naturalize both in regions with climates and floras similar to those in their native ranges, and in regions with a lower diversity or stronger human impact than in their native range.

Pollinator loss is a concern but data on their status is lacking. Here Powney et al. use occupancy modelling to estimate the degree of loss in wild bee and hoverfly species across Great Britain, and report a 55% decline in upland species and a 12% increase in dominant crop pollinators.

Accurate understanding of species biogeographic patterns is contingent upon adequate sampling effort across space. Here, the authors analyse the distribution records for 35,000 marine species, highlighting data gaps caused by undersampling in the tropics.

Omnivores like bears can switch between plant and animal diets, potentially helping them respond to changing conditions. By combining modern and fossil data, this study shows that bears shift toward carnivory in harsher climates and toward herbivory in more productive environments.

Multiple diversity facets contribute to forest ecosystem functioning. Here the authors investigate spatial patterns and predictors of forest tree species richness and structural diversity across China and project potential trends under future climate scenarios.

Here, the authors estimate mammalian biomass from the 1850’s to today, tracking an increase of over five-fold in human and domesticated mammal biomass and a two-fold decrease in wild mammal biomass. Recent trends of increase in some wild marine mammals are seen to be still far below historic levels. The results of this study are caveated due to limited historic data but have implications for conservation efforts.

Tree longevity is thought to increase in harsh environments, but global evidence of drivers is lacking. Here, the authors find two different pathways for tree longevity: slow growth in resource limited environments and increasing tree stature and/or slow growth in competitive environments.

How changes in species’ native occupancy over time relate to global naturalization success remains unclear. Here, the authors show that species with both high occupancy decades ago and increasing native occupancy ever since are more likely to become naturalized elsewhere.

Combining high-resolution mapping of foliar and herbivore faecal sodium concentrations across Africa, the authors show that plant-derived sodium availability constrains megaherbivore densities at a continental scale.

Using a global analysis of 6,511 spoken languages with 51 predictor variables spanning aspects of population, documentation, legal recognition, education policy, socioeconomic indicators and environmental features, the authors identify predictors of current and future language endangerment and loss.

Humans have altered plant biogeography by introducing species from one region to another, but an analysis of how naturalized plant species affect the uniqueness of regional floras around the world was missing. This study presents an analysis using data from native and naturalized alien floras in 658 regions, finding strong taxonomic and phylogenetic floristic homogenization overall.

Both agricultural expansion and intensification drive biodiversity losses. Here the authors quantify and compare globally the biodiversity impact of land conversion and yield increases.

Large-scale analyses of bird species traits reveal that land-use change reduces resilience of key ecological functions more than previously thought.

Global trends in species richness in the deep sea are poorly explored. This study uses occurrence records of Asteroidea to show that species richness in the deep benthos is restricted below ~1.5 °C but correlated with temperature and nutrient flux, despite different patterns across oceans and latitudes.

An ecosystem energetics approach, quantifying trophic energy flows across species, offers a unified framework for linking animal biodiversity loss to changes in ecosystem function and Earth system processes.

Analysing the distributions of >99% of the world’s seed plant flora, the authors find evidence supporting the evolutionary imbalance hypothesis, with species originating from large, biodiverse regions being more successful at naturalizing beyond their native ranges.

Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, poor dispersers, and have evolved relatively recently.

In recent decades, zoonotic disease outbreaks have become increasingly frequent, necessitating strategies to improve the accuracy of predictive modelling. This Review discusses the importance of macroecological variables in such modelling efforts to improve preparedness for future potential outbreaks.

Conserving and restoring ecosystems requires understanding what natural vegetation would look like without human disturbance. This study maps the most likely global cover of trees, short vegetation, and bare ground, showing that land management through fire and herbivory may influence ecosystems more than climate change alone.

Here, using a meta-analysis approach the authors compile a database of microbes hosted by insectivores, showing that a majority of them are viruses, that shrews and hedgehogs particularly contribute to the global virus sharing networks and that insectivores may spread of viruses of potential public health concern.