Pathogen-mediated balancing selection (PMBS) drives host evolution across the tree of life. Distinguishing between the three main mechanisms underlying PMBS, that is, rare-allele advantage, fluctuating selection and heterozygote advantage, remains difficult, limiting our understanding of frequency-dependent adaptations by hosts and counter-adaptation by pathogens. Here we...
Forest age transitions are critical in shaping the global carbon balance, yet their influence on carbon stocks and fluxes remains poorly quantified. Here we analyse global forest age dynamics from 2010 to 2020 using the Global Age Mapping Integration v2.0 dataset, alongside satellite-derived aboveground carbon (AGC) and atmospheric inversion-derived net CO2 flux data. We reveal...
Ancestral genomes are essential for studying the diversification of life from the last universal common ancestor to modern organisms. Methods have been proposed to infer ancestral gene order, but they lack scalability, limiting the depth to which gene neighbourhood evolution can be traced back. Here we introduce edgeHOG, a tool designed for accurate ancestral gene order inference...
Deleterious mutations are ubiquitous in natural populations and, when expressed, reduce fitness. However, the specific nature of these mutations and the ways in which they impact fitness remain poorly understood. We exploited recent advances in genomics to predict deleterious mutations in the black grouse (Lyrurus tetrix), an iconic lekking species. Analysis of 190 whole genomes...
The occurrence, shape and drivers of global distributional trends in species richness throughout the deep sea are poorly explored. Here we present a spatial description of the global, bathymetric and taxonomic extent of the benthic marine class Asteroidea using a compiled dataset of ~200,000 species-level occurrence records. We used these data to produce comparisons of sea-floor...
Detecting the imprints of global environmental change on biological communities is a paramount task for ecological research. But a lack of standardized long-term biomonitoring data prevents a deeper understanding of biodiversity change in the Anthropocene. Novel sources of data for analysing biodiversity change across time and space are urgently needed. By metabarcoding highly...
Human impacts on nature span vast spatial scales that transcend abiotic gradients and biogeographic barriers, yet estimates of biodiversity loss from land-use change overwhelmingly derive from local-scale studies. Using a field dataset of 971 bird species sampled in forest and cattle pasture across 13 biogeographic regions of Colombia, we quantify biodiversity losses from local...
Most faunas from the Mesozoic era were dominated by sauropod dinosaurs, the largest terrestrial animals to ever exist. These megaherbivores were remarkably diverse and widely distributed. Here we study three Late Jurassic faunas from the USA, Portugal and Tanzania, each approximately 150 million years old, which are known for their extreme sauropod diversity. Whereas general...
Bats are the only mammals capable of self-powered flight, an evolutionary innovation based on the transformation of forelimbs into wings. The bat wing is characterized by an extreme elongation of the second to fifth digits with a wing membrane called the chiropatagium connecting them. Here we investigated the developmental and cellular origin of this structure by comparing bat...
Across the world, human (anthropophonic) sounds add to sounds of biological (biophonic) and geophysical (geophonic) origin, with human contributions including both speech and technophony (sounds of technological devices). To characterize society’s contribution to the global soundscapes, we used passive acoustic recorders at 139 sites across 6 continents, sampling both urban green...
Deadwood is a major carbon source in forests, and yet the fate of this carbon remains a gap in our understanding of global carbon cycling. Lignin, the most recalcitrant biopolymer in wood, is mainly decayed through extracellular enzymatic and chemical processes initiated by white-rot fungi. However, the intracellular conversion of lignin decay products has been overlooked in the...
The role of rapid adaptation during species invasions has historically been minimized with the assumption that introductions consist of few colonists and limited genetic diversity. While overwhelming evidence suggests that rapid adaptation is more prevalent than originally assumed, the demographic and adaptive processes underlying successful invasions remain unresolved. Here we...
High-magnitude decadal to centennial-scale abrupt changes in climate had a transformative effect on many past human populations. However, our understanding of these human/climate relationships is limited because robust tests of these linkages require region-specific quantified palaeoclimatic data with sufficient chronological precision to permit comparisons to the archaeological...
How fetal and maternal cell types have co-evolved to enable mammalian placentation poses a unique evolutionary puzzle. Here we integrate and compare single-cell transcriptomes from six species bracketing therian mammal diversity: opossum (a marsupial), Malagasy common tenrec (an afrotherian), mouse and guinea pig (rodents), and macaque and human (primates). We identify a...
Species identification using DNA barcodes has revolutionized biodiversity sciences. However, conventional barcoding methods may lack power and universal applicability across the tree of life. Alternative methods based on whole genome sequencing are hard to scale due to large data requirements. Here we develop a novel DNA-based identification method, varKoding, using exceptionally...
Biodiversity declines are accelerating globally, impacting ecosystem functioning, with consequences for human health. Interactions with biodiversity can be associated with human well-being benefits at the individual level, leading to substantial gains for society when scaled up across populations. However, existing research has not accounted for the species within ecological...
Ambitious international commitments have been made to preserve biodiversity, with the goal of preventing extinctions and maintaining ecosystem resilience, yet the efficacy of large-scale protection for preventing near-term extinctions remains unclear. Here, we used a trait-based approach to show that global actions—such as the immediate abatement of all threats across at least...
Terrestrial ecosystems have been serving as a strong carbon sink that offsets one-quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Carbon use efficiency (CUE), the percentage of photosynthesized carbon that is available for biomass production and other secondary carbon products, is one factor determining the carbon sink size. The global variation in CUE remains unclear, however, as recent...
The origin of pterosaurs, the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, is poorly understood, owing to the temporal and morphological gaps that separate them from their closest non-flying relatives, the lagerpetids. Although both groups coexisted during the Late Triassic, their limited sympatry is currently unexplained, indicating that ecological partitioning, potentially...
Thousands of species are threatened by overexploitation, often driven by a complex interplay of local and global demand for various products—a dynamic frequently overlooked in wildlife trade policies. African pangolins, regarded as the world’s most trafficked wild mammals, are a heavily exploited group for different reasons across geographic scales. However, it remains unclear...
The Tibetan Plateau supports the largest alpine meadow ecosystem globally. It is considered extremely vulnerable to global warming. Knowledge of past vegetation dynamics under similarly warm climates could shed insights into where the tipping point for regime shifts may lie. We report a continuous multicentennial-resolved pollen record for the last 3.5 Myr from a lake sediment...