Molecular mechanisms of adaptive evolution in wild animals and plants.

Wild animals and plants have developed a variety of adaptive traits driven by adaptive evolution, an important strategy for species survival and persistence. Uncovering the molecular mechanisms of adaptive evolution is the key to understanding species diversification, phenotypic convergence, and inter-species interaction. As the genome sequences of more and more non-model organisms are becoming available, the focus of studies on molecular mechanisms of adaptive evolution has shifted from the candidate gene method to genetic mapping based on genome-wide scanning. In this study, we reviewed the latest research advances in wild animals and plants, focusing on adaptive traits, convergent evolution, and coevolution. Firstly, we focused on the adaptive evolution of morphological, behavioral, and physiological traits. Secondly, we reviewed the phenotypic convergences of life history traits and responding to environmental pressures, and the underlying molecular convergence mechanisms. Thirdly, we summarized the advances of coevolution, including the four main types: mutualism, parasitism, predation and competition. Overall, these latest advances greatly increase our understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms for diverse adaptive traits and species interaction, demonstrating that the development of evolutionary biology has been greatly accelerated by multi-omics technologies. Finally, we highlighted the emerging trends and future prospects around the above three aspects of adaptive evolution.

Trends in the Application of "Omics" to Ecotoxicology and Stress Ecology.

Our ability to predict and assess how environmental changes such as pollution and climate change affect components of the Earth's biome is of paramount importance. This need positioned the fields of ecotoxicology and stress ecology at the center of environmental monitoring efforts. Advances in these interdisciplinary fields depend not only on conceptual leaps but also on technological advances and data integration. High-throughput "omics" technologies enabled the measurement of molecular changes at virtually all levels of an organism's biological organization and thus continue to influence how the impacts of stressors are understood. This bibliometric review describes literature trends (2000-2020) that indicate that more different stressors than species are studied each year but that only a few stressors have been studied in more than two phyla. At the same time, the molecular responses of a diverse set of non-model species have been investigated, but cross-species comparisons are still rare. While transcriptomics studies dominated until 2016, a shift towards proteomics and multiomics studies is apparent. There is now a wealth of data at functional omics levels from many phylogenetically diverse species. This review, therefore, addresses the question of how to integrate omics information across species.

Global and national trends, gaps, and opportunities in documenting and monitoring species distributions.

Conserving and managing biodiversity in the face of ongoing global change requires sufficient evidence to assess status and trends of species distributions. Here, we propose novel indicators of biodiversity data coverage and sampling effectiveness and analyze national trajectories in closing spatiotemporal knowledge gaps for terrestrial vertebrates (1950 to 2019). Despite a rapid rise in data coverage, particularly in the last 2 decades, strong geographic and taxonomic biases persist. For some taxa and regions, a tremendous growth in records failed to directly translate into newfound knowledge due to a sharp decline in sampling effectiveness. However, we found that a nation's coverage was stronger for species for which it holds greater stewardship. As countries under the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework renew their commitments to an improved, rigorous biodiversity knowledge base, our findings highlight opportunities for international collaboration to close critical information gaps.

Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors in Rodents.

Animals evolved in complex environments, producing a wide range of behaviors, including navigation, foraging, prey capture, and conspecific interactions, which vary over timescales ranging from milliseconds to days. Historically, these behaviors have been the focus of study for ecology and ethology, while systems neuroscience has largely focused on short timescale behaviors that can be repeated thousands of times and occur in highly artificial environments. Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, miniaturization, and computation, it is newly possible to study freely moving animals in more natural conditions while applying systems techniques: performing temporally specific perturbations, modeling behavioral strategies, and recording from large numbers of neurons while animals are freely moving. The authors of this review are a group of scientists with deep appreciation for the common aims of systems neuroscience, ecology, and ethology. We believe it is an extremely exciting time to be a neuroscientist, as we have an opportunity to grow as a field, to embrace interdisciplinary, open, collaborative research to provide new insights and allow researchers to link knowledge across disciplines, species, and scales. Here we discuss the origins of ethology, ecology, and systems neuroscience in the context of our own work and highlight how combining approaches across these fields has provided fresh insights into our research. We hope this review facilitates some of these interactions and alliances and helps us all do even better science, together.

Area-based conservation in the twenty-first century.

Humanity will soon define a new era for nature-one that seeks to transform decades of underwhelming responses to the global biodiversity crisis. Area-based conservation efforts, which include both protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, are likely to extend and diversify. However, persistent shortfalls in ecological representation and management effectiveness diminish the potential role of area-based conservation in stemming biodiversity loss. Here we show how the expansion of protected areas by national governments since 2010 has had limited success in increasing the coverage across different elements of biodiversity (ecoregions, 12,056 threatened species, 'Key Biodiversity Areas' and wilderness areas) and ecosystem services (productive fisheries, and carbon services on land and sea). To be more successful after 2020, area-based conservation must contribute more effectively to meeting global biodiversity goals-ranging from preventing extinctions to retaining the most-intact ecosystems-and must better collaborate with the many Indigenous peoples, community groups and private initiatives that are central to the successful conservation of biodiversity. The long-term success of area-based conservation requires parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to secure adequate financing, plan for climate change and make biodiversity conservation a far stronger part of land, water and sea management policies.

Landscape configuration and habitat complexity shape arthropod assemblage in urban parks.

The urbanization process systematically leads to the loss of biodiversity. Only certain arthropods are resilient to the urbanization process and can thrive in the novel conditions of urbanized landscapes. However, the degree to which arthropod communities survive in urban habitats depends on landscape and local effects and biological interactions (e.g., trophic interactions). In the present study, we examined the relative importance of various factors at landscape (isolation, edge density and area of surrounding greenery) and local (size of park, canopy cover, understory vegetation cover, defoliation depth, weight of dried leaves, soil temperature, soil moisture, and soil pH) spatial scales on the diversity of ants, beetles and spiders in urban parks. Our results indicated that park edge density was negatively correlated with diversity metrics in ants, beetles, and spiders in urban parks relative to the degree of proximity with the peri-urban forest. In other words, parks that located adjacent to the peri-urban forest may not necessarily have high biodiversity. The results suggested that man-made structures have been effective dispersal barriers that limit the spillover effects of ants and spiders but not the spillover of comparatively strong fliers, such as beetles. However, the area of surrounding greenery may have facilitated the colonization of forest-dependent taxa in distant parks. Large parks with reduced edge density supported a higher arthropod diversity because of the minimal edge effect and increased habitat heterogeneity. Vegetation structure consistently explained the variability of ants, beetles, and spiders, indicating that understory plant litter is crucial for providing shelters and hibernation, oviposition, and foraging sites for the major taxa in urban parks. Therefore, efforts should focus on the local management of ground features to maximize the conservation of biological control in urban landscapes.

Assessing the resilience of the belt and road countries and its spatial heterogeneity: A comprehensive approach.

Regional resilience refers to the resilience of a country or region against the ecological environment, social economy, and other internal and external natural factors and human factors in the process of development. When this resilience is lower than a certain critical threshold, the country or region will be in a fragile state. The comprehensive embodiment of ecological resilience, social resilience, and economic resilience of a country or region is regional resilience. Due to the wide range of countries along "the Belt and Road", differences in natural background conditions and stages of economic and social development among different countries lead to different degrees of vulnerability, and the improvement of resilience is conducive to reducing vulnerability. At the same time, the research on the measurement and differentiation characteristics of regional resilience is of considerable significance to solve the weak foundation of environmental management and the lack of ability to deal with climate change of "the Belt and Road" countries. In this study, by using entropy weighting method and multi-index comprehensive evaluation method, 24 specific indicators are selected from three different dimensions: ecology, economy, and society, to construct a comprehensive evaluation index system about "the Belt and Road" countries resilience, and to evaluate the comprehensive resilience and spatial heterogeneity characteristics of China and 64 countries along "the Belt and Road", and use multiple linear regression analysis to identify the main influencing factors of comprehensive resilience and analyze its influencing mechanism. According to the research, the overall resilience level of "the Belt and Road" countries shows prominent differentiation characteristics of "extreme difference", the countries with low and low recovery status account for the vast majority; and the spatial differentiation characteristics of the levels of ecological resilience, economic resilience, and social resilience of countries along "the Belt and Road" are quite different. In countries with high levels of economic development, their comprehensive resilience is significantly higher than that of countries with low levels of economic development. There is no inevitable connection between a country's economic growth rate and its comprehensive resilience level. At the same time, the relationship between resource richness and comprehensive resilience of countries is not apparent, but for those countries that are over-dependent on resources, the level of resilience is generally below. There is a certain degree of correspondence between urbanization rate and comprehensive resilience, that is, the comprehensive resilience will increase with the increase of urbanization rate. When the urbanization rate rises to a certain level, the level of comprehensive resilience does not change much. In this study, it provides scientific guidance for enriching regional resilience and national sustainable development theory, solving the fragile ecological environment foundation of "the Belt and Road" countries, speeding up the transformation of economic growth mode and dealing with a series of social problems.

Long-term loss in extent and current protection of terrestrial ecosystem diversity in the temperate and tropical Americas.

Documenting changes in ecosystem extent and protection is essential to understanding status of biodiversity and related ecosystem services and have direct applications to measuring Essential Biodiversity Variables, Targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. We developed both potential and current distribution maps of terrestrial ecosystem types for the temperate and tropical Americas; with "potential" estimating where a type would likely occur today had there not been prior land conversion for modern land uses. We utilized a hierarchical classification to describe and map natural ecosystem types at six levels of thematic detail, with lower thematic levels defining more units each with narrower floristic range than upper levels. Current land use/land cover was derived using available global data on human land use intensity and combined with the potential distribution maps to estimate long-term change in extent for each ecosystem type. We also assessed representation of ecosystem types within protected areas as defined by IUCN I-VI land status categories. Of the 749 ecosystem types assessed, represented at 5th (n = 315) vs. 6th (n = 433) levels of the classification hierarchy, 5 types (1.6%) and 31 types (7.1%), respectively, have lost >90% of their potential extent. Some 66 types (20.9%) and 141 types (32.5%), respectively, have lost >50% of their potential extent; thus, crossing thresholds of Vulnerable status under IUCN Red List criterion A3. For ecosystem type representation within IUCN protected area classes, with reference to potential extent of each type, 111 (45.3%) and 125 (28.8%) of types, respectively, have higher representation (>17%) than CBD 2020 targets. Twelve types (3.8%) and 23 (5.3%) of types, respectively, are represented with <1% within protected areas. We illustrate an option for visualizing and reporting on CBD targets (2020 and proposed post-2020) for ecosystem representativeness using both potential extent as a baseline.

Toward High-Throughput Fungal Electroculturomics and New Omics Methodologies in 21st-Century Microbiology and Ecology.

Modern microbiology and drug development are in a watershed moment with the advent of electroceuticals. In addition to genomics, electrical impulses in an organism are believed to contribute to tissue and cellular plasticity. Hence, electroceuticals or bioelectronics offers the promise to identify innovative approaches to treat human diseases. However, applications toward electromicrobiology are still limited and rare, despite the high potential to innovate the fields of both microbiology and therapeutics. For example, electric modalities for manipulating microbial growth are highly sustainable; can be combined with biopharmaceuticals, probiotics, and pharmacobiotics; and, thus, are well poised for use in medicine, public health, and ecology and diverse industries. We report here the introduction of a new research framework and technology platform for electroculturomics, by coupling standard solid-state mycological cultures with conductive treatment using a conformité Européene (CE-)-certified medical ionophoresis device. We share our experience with a diverse range of fungi that have been treated with the electroculturomics approach reported herein. We suggest that this line of inquiry can be extended to electrotranscriptomics and electrometabolomics by deploying electroculturomics in tandem with multi-omics approaches in the future. This article makes a specific contribution to fungal microbiology, and a broader contribution to advance the theory and practice of the field of electroculturomics emerging in 21st-century microbiology and ecology research.

Towards a mechanistic understanding of competence: a missing link in diversity-disease research.

Biodiversity loss may increase the risk of infectious disease in a phenomenon known as the dilution effect. Circumstances that increase the likelihood of disease dilution are: (i) when hosts vary in their competence, and (ii) when communities disassemble predictably, such that the least competent hosts are the most likely to go extinct. Despite the central role of competence in diversity-disease theory, we lack a clear understanding of the factors underlying competence, as well as the drivers and extent of its variation. Our perspective piece encourages a mechanistic understanding of competence and a deeper consideration of its role in diversity-disease relationships. We outline current evidence, emerging questions and future directions regarding the basis of competence, its definition and measurement, the roots of its variation and its role in the community ecology of infectious disease.

Forecasting unprecedented ecological fluctuations.

Forecasting 'Black Swan' events in ecosystems is an important but challenging task. Many ecosystems display aperiodic fluctuations in species abundance spanning orders of magnitude in scale, which have vast environmental and economic impact. Empirical evidence and theoretical analyses suggest that these dynamics are in a regime where system nonlinearities limit accurate forecasting of unprecedented events due to poor extrapolation of historical data to unsampled states. Leveraging increasingly available long-term high-frequency ecological tracking data, we analyze multiple natural and experimental ecosystems (marine plankton, intertidal mollusks, and deciduous forest), and recover hidden linearity embedded in universal 'scaling laws' of species dynamics. We then develop a method using these scaling laws to reduce data dependence in ecological forecasting and accurately predict extreme events beyond the span of historical observations in diverse ecosystems.