Search

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

A re-assessment of the global carbon budget shows the natural land sink is substantially smaller than previously estimated, indicating emerging impacts of climate change on the evolution of the carbon sinks.

Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change and ecosystem functioning. Here the authors identify thresholds of grassland plant community structure and stability in response to land use intensification.

Surveys of reef change are combined with a unique 20-year time series of land–sea human impacts and the results show that integrated land–sea management could help achieve coastal ocean conservation goals and provide coral reefs with the best opportunity to persist in our changing climate.

After forest loss, public subsidies often encourage reforestation with tree plantations. This modelling study finds that between 1986 and 2011, Chile’s forest subsidies probably reduced biodiversity without increasing carbon stored in aboveground plant material.

Research in the tropics is unevenly distributed across regions and biomes. Here, the authors find that moist broadleaf forests account for 73% of all tropical citations but cover 29% of the land area, while drier, climate-vulnerable areas with fewer trees remain under-sampled and under-cited.

Wind farms would benefit from optimization of their design and operation. Harrison-Atlas et al. report an artificial intelligence-aided optimization approach that shows the potential of wake steering strategies to minimize land requirements and costs.

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.

Continental export of silicon to the coast is linked to ocean carbon sinks, but terrestrial silicon fluxes have not been quantified. Here, human deforestation and cultivation of the landscape are shown to be the most important factors in silicon mobilization in temperate European watersheds.

Yakut communities, with Trans-Baikal admixture during the Mongol expansion, preserved genomic diversity and oral microbiomes despite the Russian conquest, which introduced cereals, pathogens and Christianity, whereas marital practices preserved low consanguinity except in one late case of traditional shamanism.

Coastal cities face a compound threat from relative sea-level rise and land subsidence; however, local land subsidence rates are spatially variable and can be difficult to quantify. Remote interferometric radar observations allow high-resolution estimations of local land subsidence to better inform the future of major coastal cities.

The direct effects of land-cover change on surface climate are increasingly well understood, but fewer studies have investigated the consequences of the trend towards more intensive land management practices. Now, research investigating the biophysical effects of temperate land-management changes reveals a net warming effect of similar magnitude to that driven by changing land cover.

Ice core records of gradually declining atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) for the period 1450–1700 CE support modelled scenarios of large-scale reorganisation of land use in the Americas following New World-Old World contact.

Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change. Here the authors measure diversity across multiple trophic levels in agricultural grassland landscapes of varying management, finding decoupled responses of above- and belowground taxa to local factors and a strong impact of landscape-level land use.

The phenolic polymer lignin is thought to have contributed to adaptation of early land plants to terrestrial environments. Here Renaultet al. show that moss, which does not produce lignin, contains an ancestral phenolic metabolism pathway that produces a phenol-enriched cuticle and prevents desiccation.

Efficient statistical emulation of melting land ice under various climate scenarios to 2100 indicates a contribution from melting land ice to sea level increase of at least 13 centimetres sea level equivalent.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

Here, the authors use sedimentary DNA, pollen, fungal spores, chironomids, and microcharcoal from an alpine lake core to reconstruct vegetation across 12,000 years. They find that vegetation responded to climate in the early Holocene, followed by a shift to human activity from 6000 years onward corresponding with an increase in deforestation and agropastoralism.

During the latest Eocene, declining atmospheric CO₂ levels led to the inception of the Antarctic ice sheet. Simulations suggest that the deepening of the Drake Passage caused climate changes that enhanced continental weathering and CO₂ drawdown.

Climate change is expected to intensify the global hydrological cycle and to alter evapotranspiration, but direct observational constraints are lacking at the global scale. Now a data-driven, machine-learning technique and a suite of process-based models have been used to show that from 1982 to 1997 global evapotranspiration increased by about 7.1 millimetres per year per decade. But since 1998 this increase has ceased, probably because of moisture limitation in the Southern Hemisphere.

Global warming is non-uniform in time and space, but to understand potential impacts we need better understanding of its evolution. This work breaks down the warming trend and finds that it began in the subtropical and subpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere, followed by the subtropical region of the Southern Hemisphere. The warming bands in the Northern Hemisphere expanded during the period 1950–1985 and merged to cover the entire hemisphere.

The genomes of two fern species, Azolla filiculoides and Salvinia cucullata, are reported and provide insights into fern-specific whole-genome duplications, fern-specific insect-resistant gene evolution and fern–cyanobacterial symbiosis.

Organisms vary in their nitrogen and phosphorus content, shaping ecological and evolutionary processes. This study shows that nitrogen deposition is a consistent global factor associated with plant and animal stoichiometry.

Using well-calibrated statistical methods the authors jointly analyze Undiagnosed Diseases Network genomes, identifying known and novel disease genes. Software is publicly available to support future cross-cohort rare disease discovery efforts.

Nutrient-induced soil carbon gains in grasslands can persist for decades after fertilization stops as long as the soil remains untilled, according to a multidecadal field experiment on retired agricultural fields with sandy soils.

A non-cyanobacterial diazotroph previously isolated from a marine eukaryotic phytoplankton triggers formation of nitrogen-fixing root nodules when inoculated onto a terrestrial legume.

A high-resolution update of Antarctic bed topography using mass conservation reveals broad stabilizing ridges for glaciers flowing across the Transantarctic Mountains, and stabilizing slopes beneath Moscow University, Totten and Lambert glacier system.

This study shows that the 2025 Mw 7.7 Myanmar earthquake ruptured 500 km of the Sagaing Fault with nearly no shallow slip deficit, revealing that mature, linear strike-slip faults can release strain efficiently, unlike less mature faults.

Here, the authors leverage data from the Tara Oceans expeditions to perform a phylogeny-guided plastid genome-resolved metagenomic survey and provide 660 non-redundant plastid genomes from marine algae. They identify a rare, deep branching plastid lineage of nano-sized algae, describing their diversity, phylogeny, distribution and relevance to our understanding of plastid endosymbioses.

Cultivated areas have expanded at the expense of forests, including primary and protected forests, in Southeast Asian highlands, according to an analysis of satellite imagery of the region.

The Pacific sector of Antarctica has experienced substantial warming in the past 30 years. Observations of global surface temperatures and atmospheric circulation data show that the warming in continental West Antarctica is linked to sea surface temperature changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Analysis of shallow-water marine carbonate samples from 101 stratigraphic units allows construction of a record of lithium isotopes from the past 3 billion years, tracking the evolution of the global carbon and silicon cycles.

The authors test whether spatial scale (plot, local and landscape) affects the supply of various ecosystem services in grasslands, finding that some services are predicted by plot-level properties while others depend more on landscape-level management.

Bottom-up and top-down approaches are used to quantify global nitrous oxide sources and sinks resulting from both natural and anthropogenic sources, revealing a 30% increase in global human-induced emissions between 1980 and 2016.

Satellite data for the period 1982–2016 reveal changes in land use and land cover at global and regional scales that reflect patterns of land change indicative of a human-dominated Earth system.

Analysis of a large grassland biodiversity dataset shows that increases in local land-use intensity cause biotic homogenization at landscape scale across microbial, plant and animal groups, both above- and belowground, that is largely independent of changes in local diversity.

The US Midwest is a promising region for the production of cellulosic biofuel, yet a greater understanding of the interactions between landscape-related decisions, biorefinery design and carbon capture integration is still needed. O’Neill et al. use fine-scale spatially explicit modelling to analyse the cost and greenhouse gas mitigation potential for such fuels in this region.