Volume 9 Issue 3, March 2025

A mathematical framework integrates the effect of disturbances on ecosystem services under climate change, and offers a vital tool to incorporate changing disturbance regimes into risk-sensitive decision making.

New comprehensive datasets of threats to species, management actions and costs of these actions reveal the total costs of fully recovering all of Australia’s threatened species. At AUD $583 billion per year (25% of Australia’s GDP for 2023), the cost of reversing two centuries of declines showcases the recovery challenge ahead and the value of avoiding further degradation.

In a serial passage experiment with a 23-species model microbial community, we found that higher dispersal led to stronger spread of the effects of antibiotic disturbance across a metacommunity. This effect was cancelled by protecting the species from the disturbance through adaptation.

This study introduces a method to systematically compare the functions of homologous (shared) genes between the X and Y chromosomes (gametologues) across the human body. The authors discover differences that are linked to the evolutionary histories of these genes and could contribute to sex-biased biology and disease.

This Progress discusses potential applications of artificial intelligence models that generate new data and how they can be used to advance ecology research.

As wood growth in deciduous tree stems halts during winter, it has been assumed that wood growth in coarse roots follows the same pattern. This study on the growth of stem and coarse roots of four European tree species challenges the assumption of winter halt in below-ground wood growth of temperate deciduous trees.

Community resilience to stress is affected by factors such as pre-exposure to the same stress and intercommunity dispersal. The authors show that pre-exposing the most dominant members of a 23-species bacterial community to different levels of antibiotic stress leads to rapid evolution of resistance that improves metacommunity resilience even under high levels of dispersal.

Predicting invasion outcomes in microbial communities is challenging. Here the authors demonstrate that these outcomes in both theoretical and experimental microbial communities can be predicted based on community dynamics, diversity and species interactions.

Analysis of the 36 National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans that were submitted to the Convention on Biological Diversity by 21 October 2024 reveal that no nation has yet created a plan that meets all elements of targets 2 and 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

An estimated AU$583 billion per year cost of in situ recovery of terrestrial and freshwater species in Australia, including through habitat restoration and retention and management of invasive species, is not an expected conservation budget, but exemplifies the severe cost of nature declines.

A generalizable, functional-trait-based approach for quantifying the effects of disturbances to ecosystem services and economic outcomes, including under climate change, highlights the need for incorporating disturbances in ecosystem services assessments.

Based on co-expression fingerprint analysis between homologous genes in the X and Y chromosomes (gametolog pairs) across >40 human tissues, the authors suggest that X and Y gametologs have diverged in function.

A phylogenetic comparative analysis of male and female body size across tetrapods globally shows that directional change in size is usually greater in males but reveals different underlying mechanisms among lineages.

Based on phylogenomic and geometric morphometric analyses of 132 anglerfish species, the authors infer a Cretaceous origin of the clade and show that bathypelagic anglerfish are undergoing rapid phenotypic diversification despite inhabiting a relatively homogeneous deep-sea habitat.

On the basis of data from >329,000 migratory birds, this study presents multispecies migratory connectivity as a parameter representing exposure to global change and shows that connections between breeding regions in Canada and non-breeding regions in South America are at greatest risk from global change.

Boreal forests have been experiencing both gains and losses in recent decades. Here, the authors show that boreal forest resilience is more sensitive to forest cover losses than to gains, indicating that functional declines due to forest loss outpace improvements following forest recovery.

Semistructured interviews and focus groups with experts in biodiversity finance in Europe identify opportunities and barriers to upscaling private investment in biodiversity, and emphasize that public policy is the key to enabling progression.

Joana Meier is fascinated by the diversity and mimetic colour patterns of glasswing butterflies.