Trends in ecology & evolution最新文献

Soil ecoacoustics is an emerging field and suite of tools that use sound and vibration to detect belowground biological activity. It offers a minimally invasive way to assess soil communities and ecosystem processes. Across biomes, we found that soil ecoacoustics is being used to detect organisms, quantify animal behaviour, monitor soil health, and assess restoration interventions. In this review, we show that ecoacoustic metrics reflect changes in soil fauna activity, disturbance impacts, and recovery trajectories. However, major challenges remain, including inconsistent terminology, limited understanding of sound propagation across soil types, difficulty separating biotic from abiotic signals, and a lack of standardised methods. Thus, we propose foundational standard operating procedures (SOPs) and identify how soil ecoacoustics could be integrated into global biodiversity monitoring frameworks.

Parasite-parasite interactions occur both within and between hosts, but the two scales are rarely considered together. Consequently, there is a gap in our ability to predict the integrated effects of interactions occurring across scales, disentangle their relative contributions to key ecological outcomes, and accurately identify the drivers of host-parasite evolutionary responses. Here, we extend the standard susceptible-infected framework of theoretical epidemiology to explicitly incorporate parasite-parasite interactions across scales. We identify where - in each step of the transmission process - such interactions may occur, at the within- or between-host levels, providing empirical examples where possible. Thus, we demonstrate how integrating the two scales provides a more complete understanding of the evolutionary ecology of multi-parasite systems and suggest future avenues of investigation.

It is widely accepted that we face a biodiversity crisis due to human activities, and we need active conservation interventions to address it. Natural history museums have recently made public commitments to play a more active role in helping to address the biodiversity crisis. What role might they play in helping nature recover? To answer this question, we recognise a hierarchy of conservation interventions (species, community and whole systems) and illustrate the role that museums can play in these. We also discuss how museums enable people to engage with conservation science. While barriers remain, there are significant opportunities for the conservation community to better integrate collections into their research. We need museums to help enable this to happen.

Nature's contributions to people (NCP) are essential for human wellbeing, yet most assessments still rely on land-cover indicators that overlook how biodiversity supports these contributions. We propose that species-level data, widely used in biodiversity mapping, can better inform direct NCP prediction through the development of species' contributions to people (SCP). Linking species to NCP through relational SCP databases and combining these with species distribution models and global change scenarios can yield spatial NCP predictions that can be better rooted in species' ecological characteristics. This approach fosters integrated biodiversity-NCP planning and supports conservation goals. We outline key methodological steps, identify research needs, and encourage collective progress to advance SCP knowledge for a transformative shift in how we assess and manage NCP.

Incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) generates widespread genomic discordance in rapidly radiating lineages, yet its phenotypic impacts remain poorly understood. Among hominids, over 30% of the human genome supports conflicting phylogenetic trees due to ILS, affecting numerous genes with morphological functions. We present a trait-based approach integrating comparative morphology, population genomics, and functional experiments to identify and validate ILS-affected traits in hominids, often interpreted as convergent adaptations. Phylogenetically incongruent traits are frequent in the craniofacial and appendicular skeletons, highlighting priority areas for ILS investigation and ascertainment bias. This approach requires collaborative models bridging morphological and genomic data gaps in non-human hominid research, illuminating the forces shaping great ape evolution and establishing a roadmap for exploring ILS consequences in diverse taxonomic groups.

Eradication and control of invasive pests in the sea is poorly developed. Advancing beyond cumbersome, inefficient, and often manual removal of marine pests will require ambition and innovation. We outline key steps to enable effective marine pest control and eradication by (i) building upon strategic and tactical approaches used in successful terrestrial pest control campaigns, and (ii) developing a toolbox of effective and scalable marine pest-control methods. To overcome widespread defeatism, we advocate that marine biosecurity risk-benefit decision making should favor action to build knowledge and confidence of how to drive pest populations into decline. These are achievable steps toward stronger marine biosecurity systems that can expand our capacity to eliminate or reduce pest populations and their negative impacts.

Chronic anthropogenic disturbances (i.e., the continuous removal of small portions of forest biomass) are pervasive in tropical dry forest. We demonstrate that these disturbances trigger consistent changes across multiple ecological levels, from population to ecosystem levels. Plant populations exhibit contrasting responses, with some species being negatively affected, whereas others persist or even thrive. Communities become species-poor and dominated by disturbance-adapted plant and animal species. At the ecosystem level, chronic disturbances reduce forest biomass, soil nutrient concentration/stocks, productivity, and the provision of ecosystem services. Collectively, these responses drive dry forests across four potential transitions: arrested succession, forest-shrub conversion, novel ecosystems, and desertification.

Since their inception, ecology and evolutionary biology have been filled with controversies. While controversies are generally beneficial, they can sometimes hinder meaningful communication and, ultimately, decelerate scientific advancement. A clear example is when scientific rivals enter a point-scoring mode in which proving the opponent wrong sidelines objective assessments. To counter this, we introduce to the ecology and evolutionary biology audiences the adversarial collaboration approach, where opponents cooperatively address their disagreements to advance their field. We describe the logic of adversarial collaboration, examine a series of potential challenges to its successful adoption in these disciplines, and show how they can be overcome. Adversarial collaboration is an invitation to align controversies with the scientific ethos of collectively seeking empirical truths.

Historical nonequilibrium processes are often considered the main drivers of global biodiversity patterns. We argue that while biodiversity is often out of equilibrium, the concept of equilibrium is still crucial for interpreting macroecological diversity patterns, and current confusion in the literature stems from misunderstandings concerning equilibrium dynamics. We demonstrate how an equilibrium-based framework, such as the 'Equilibrium Theory of Biodiversity Dynamics' (ETBD), illuminates diversity patterns in space and time, including the latitudinal diversity gradient, even in the out-of-equilibrium context. This framework has profound implications for understanding diversity dynamics during historical, current, and future climate changes, suggesting that while temperate diversity is probably below its equilibrium level, tropical biodiversity could be above its equilibrium, elevating extinction risk in tropical biomes.

Disruption of the temperature-humidity balance poses a threat to global ecosystems and affects the spread of infectious diseases. A long-term study by Theodosopoulos et al. on a wild bird population in a temperate region of Northern Europe reveals a significant increase in avian malaria parasite prevalence under a climate-warming scenario.