Macroecology articles from across Nature Portfolio

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By leveraging a spatially representative dataset that comprises more than 300,000 trees from 3,396 natural forest plots, we fill crucial knowledge gaps regarding fine-grained spatial patterns, driving mechanisms and the future potential of tree species richness and structural diversity in China’s natural forests.

A high-resolution map of plant sodium concentrations across sub-Saharan Africa reveals that the distribution of large mammalian herbivores aligns with a diet of modest salt intake, with higher herbivore densities in habitats with intermediate concentrations of foliar sodium.

Twenty years of occurrence data for North American birds suggest that range shifts in some, but not all, bird species have partly mitigated the effects of climate change.

Climate change is exacerbating the severity of drought for life on land, especially for drying-sensitive species such as anurans (frogs and toads). Evaporative water loss rates for anurans are expected to double in areas with increased aridity. Increased drought severity combined with climate warming will likely reduce activity time for anurans owing to physiological limits.

An analysis of nearly 44,000 mutualistic, commensalistic and parasitic interactions suggests that a species’ ecological generalism results from, rather than causes, ecological success.