Apr 2025

• TrendsTalk

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    Disability in ecology and evolution

    • Joseph Hanly,
    • Anon,
    • Jan Perret,
    • Anam Khan

    Joseph Hanly

Science & Societies

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  Stewardship underpins sustainable foraging

  • Irene Teixidor-Toneu,
  • Giulia Mattalia,
  • Sophie Caillon,
  • Abdullah Abdullah,
  • Živa Fiser,
  • Pål Karlsen,
  • Shujaul Mulk Khan,
  • Anneleen Kool,
  • Gabriela Loayza,
  • Anna Porcuna-Ferrer,
  • Ismael Vaccaro,
  • Christoph Schunko

  Open Access

  Foraging wild plants and mushrooms can be both beneficial and detrimental to biodiversity. We examine the role of stewardship practices, which are grounded in care, knowledge, and agency, in fostering sustainable use of wild species. These practices are pervasive among foragers across social–ecological systems yet neglected in research and policymaking.
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  Our not-so-natural connection to nature

  • Yannick Joye,
  • Andreas De Block

  The biophilia hypothesis has been influential in explaining humans' attraction to nature. Here, we critically evaluate recent research on biophilia, focusing on automatic and instinct-like responses to nature. We explore how biophilia-based interventions may contribute to inequality and propose cultural evolution as a parsimonious alternative to biophilia.
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  Neglected supralittoral habitats on coastal artificial structures

  • Fabio Bulleri,
  • Moisés A. Aguilera,
  • Martin Thiel

  Artificial structures are ubiquitous features of urbanized coastal landscapes, but research and management solutions have focused on lower shore communities, neglecting the terrestrial-marine transitional zone. The ecological role of supralittoral habitats on artificial structures generates unique opportunities for the conservation of native species and reducing the spread of nondesired species.

Letters

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  Plant community signatures of nutrient dilution

  • Joshua S. Lynn,
  • Brenden Beckett,
  • Christopher R. Taylor

  Kaspari and Welti [1] argued that reductions in plant nutrient concentration in response to CO₂ fertilisation, nutrient flux out of ecosystems, and other global changes have led to invertebrate population declines by decreasing the bite-by-bite nutritional value of their food: termed nutrient dilution (ND). As such, ND was primarily described as a biochemical response of vegetation to global change. In this letter we detail how this biochemical mechanism of ND can be complemented by a second mechanism where plant communities shift towards less nutritious species with global changes.
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  Building plant diversity into mechanisms of nutrient dilution

  • Michael Kaspari,
  • Ellen A.R. Welti

  We appreciate the proposal of Lynn et al. [1] that plant species turnover in response to increasing CO₂ (e.g., ‘shrubification’) can be a second basic mechanism of nutrient dilution (ND, a decrease in plant tissue concentration of a given essential element). They posit that ND at the community level can arise when individuals from plant species with low elemental concentrations replace those species with higher elemental concentrations. We agree that such shifts may be reshaping patterns of nutrient availability for herbivores and are worth further exploring.

Forum

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  Tandem repeat polymorphisms shape local adaptation

  • David G. King

  Within widespread populations, efficient adaptation to local environmental conditions can be facilitated by abundant quantitative variation supplied by short tandem DNA repeats. The peculiar site-specific mutability of such repeats can provide populations with the functional equivalent of tuning knobs for adaptively adjusting quantitative trait values.

Opinions

• Featured Article
  

  Integrating social learning, social networks, and non-parental transgenerational plasticity

  • Jennifer K. Hellmann,
  • Andrew Sih

  Transgenerational plasticity (TGP) has largely focused on how parental exposure to ecological conditions shapes the phenotypes of future generations. However, organisms acquire information about their ecological environment via social learning, which can also shape TGP in profound ways. We demonstrate that non-parents alter how parents detect and respond to environmental cues in ways that spillover to affect offspring, non-parents influence offspring even without direct physical interactions, and parental cues received by offspring can alter the phenotypes of other juveniles. Because parents can draw on the experiences of a network of non-parents, these socially acquired cues may increase parents’ ability to accurately detect environmental shifts and may explain why TGP is surprisingly ubiquitous despite theory predicting that it should be relatively rare.
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  The power of caring touch: from survival to prosocial cooperation

  • Michael Griesser,
  • Nigel C. Bennett,
  • Judith M. Burkart,
  • Daniel W. Hart,
  • Natalie Uomini,
  • Miyako H. Warrington

  Open Access

  Cooperation is a pivotal biological phenomenon that occurs in diverse forms. In species that engage in helping, individuals vary in the time they spend together and the degree of their physical proximity, which affects the extent of physical touch between individuals. Here, we propose that touch activates a hormonal feedback loop that supports bond formation and maintenance in mating, parenting, and social contexts. Notably, extended parenting is essential for the emergence of enduring bonds and the development of the prosocial mindset that fosters forms of cooperation with delayed benefits. We incorporate these ideas into the caring-touch hypothesis (CT-H), which emphasizes the role of oxytocin-vasotocin hormones, touch, and enduring bonds in the evolution of different forms of cooperation.
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  ‘Domesticability’: were some species predisposed for domestication?

  • Anne J. Romero,
  • Anastasia Kolesnikova,
  • Thomas H.G. Ezard,
  • Michael Charles,
  • Rafal M. Gutaker,
  • Colin P. Osborne,
  • Mark A. Chapman

  Open Access

  Crop domestication arises from a coevolutionary process between plants and humans, resulting in predictable and improved resources for humans. Of the thousands of edible species, many were collected or cultivated for food, but only a few became domesticated and even fewer supply the bulk of the plant-based calories consumed by humans. Why so few species became fully domesticated is not understood. Here we propose three aspects of plant genomes and phenotypes that could have promoted the domestication of only a few wild species, namely differences in plasticity, trait linkage, and mutation rates. We can use contemporary biological knowledge to identify factors underlying why only some species are amenable to domestication. Such studies will facilitate future domestication and improvement efforts.
• Featured Article
  

  The underappreciated roles of aboveground vertebrates on belowground communities

  • Kanji M. Tomita,
  • Philip J. Manlick,
  • Kobayashi Makoto,
  • Saori Fujii,
  • Fujio Hyodo,
  • Tadashi Miyashita,
  • Tomonori Tsunoda

  In recent decades, evidence of interactions between aboveground and belowground (i.e., soil) subsystems has accumulated. The effects of aboveground vertebrates on belowground communities have traditionally focused on plant-mediated pathways, but we show that aboveground vertebrates impact belowground communities and ecological functions without plant-mediated pathways via both consumptive and non-consumptive processes. We then show that mobile, aboveground vertebrates have significant but often unrealized potential to structure soil communities from local to macroecological scales by linking aboveground and belowground food webs across habitats and ecosystems. Collectively, this synthesis of aboveground vertebrate effects on belowground communities integrates multiple ecological disciplines to advance a more comprehensive understanding of aboveground–belowground linkages across space and time.
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  Questioning the sixth mass extinction

  • John J. Wiens,
  • Kristen E. Saban

  Open Access

  The idea that Earth is currently experiencing a sixth mass extinction is widespread. We critically evaluate this claim. Very few studies have tested this idea. Some studies showed that recent extinction rates are faster than fossil background rates, but extinction rates can exceed background rates outside mass extinctions. Other studies extrapolated from recent extinctions to project 75% global species loss. But these recent extinctions were mostly of island species. No cause was specified for these future extinctions, and >50% of assessed species are considered non-threatened. We find numerous other issues. Proponents of the sixth mass extinction have made invaluable contributions by highlighting recent extinctions, but these extinctions may not be equivalent to past mass extinctions or relevant to current threats.
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  Understanding biological invasions through the lens of environmental niches

  • Chunlong Liu,
  • Céline Bellard,
  • Jonathan M. Jeschke

  Understanding successful invasions across taxa and systems in a unified framework is a central goal of biological conservation. While the environmental niche is a promising concept to improve our understanding of biological invasions, existing studies have not applied it to comprehensively examine all invasion stages. Here, we provide a framework that integrates the environmental niche and invasion process at both the species and the population level. By elucidating how species and populations perform in the niche space, we demonstrate how different dimensions of species niches can help in understanding inter- and intraspecific variations in the success and impact of non-native species, and identify knowledge gaps. The niche framework also offers flexibility in integrating other factors driving the success and impact of non-native species.

Review

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  Advances in systematic conservation planning to meet global biodiversity goals

  • Sylvaine Giakoumi,
  • Anthony J. Richardson,
  • Aggeliki Doxa,
  • Stefano Moro,
  • Marco Andrello,
  • Jeffrey O. Hanson,
  • Virgilio Hermoso,
  • Tessa Mazor,
  • Jennifer McGowan,
  • Heini Kujala,
  • Elizabeth Law,
  • Jorge G. Álvarez-Romero,
  • Rafael A. Magris,
  • Elena Gissi,
  • Nur Arafeh-Dalmau,
  • Anna Metaxas,
  • Elina A. Virtanen,
  • Natalie C. Ban,
  • Robert M. Runya,
  • Daniel C. Dunn,
  • Simonetta Fraschetti,
  • Ibon Galparsoro,
  • Robert J. Smith,
  • Francois Bastardie,
  • Vanessa Stelzenmüller,
  • Hugh P. Possingham,
  • Stelios Katsanevakis

  Open Access

  Systematic conservation planning (SCP) involves the cost-effective placement and application of management actions to achieve biodiversity conservation objectives. Given the political momentum for greater global nature protection, restoration, and improved management of natural resources articulated in the targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework, assessing the state-of-the-art of SCP is timely. Recent advances in SCP include faster and more exact algorithms and software, inclusion of ecosystem services and multiple facets of biodiversity (e.g., genetic diversity, functional diversity), climate-smart approaches, prioritizing multiple actions, and increased SCP accessibility through online tools. To promote the adoption of SCP by decision-makers, we provide recommendations for bridging the gap between SCP science and practice, such as standardizing the communication of planning uncertainty and capacity-building training courses.

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