We describe and illustrate Croton awaensis , a new species of dragon’s blood tree ( Croton sect. Cyclostigma ) with medicinal value distributed in the Chocó and Andean regions of Ecuador and Colombia. The species is a medium-sized tree occurring in humid lowland and lower montane forests, between 300 to 1500 m. It is characterized by a sublepidote indumentum, falciform stipules, 2 acropetiolar nectaries on the abaxial side of...

Fish communities at greater depths on a reef are thought to be less affected by disturbances that more strongly impact shallower areas. As a result, these deeper communities might be expected to show less change in their diversity and composition over time compared to those in shallow water. To test this hypothesis, we analysed changes in reef fish composition at 5-15 m and 25-40 m on reefs around Utila, Honduras, across two t...

Radiocarbon‐dated fossils indicate woolly mammoths were extirpated from mainland Beringia around 13 000 years ago. However, environmental DNA in permafrost suggests small “cryptic“ populations survived into the Holocene. Resolving this discrepancy is crucial to understanding the drivers of mammoth extinction. The Adopt‐a‐Mammoth project, launched in 2022, is increasing the number of radiocarbon‐dated mammoth fossils to locate...

Whole‐genome sequencing (WGS) has greatly expanded researchers' ability to study structural variants (SVs), that is, the variation in the presence, number, orientation or position of a DNA sequence. This has paved the way to study the eco‐evolutionary dynamics of SVs across the tree of life and within a population genomics framework. In this review, we provide the necessary fundamentals to help researchers generate and analyse...

Major threats to marine species and ecosystems include overfishing, invasive species, pollution and climate change. The changing climate not only imposes direct threats through the impacts of severe marine heatwaves, cyclones and ocean acidification but also complicates fisheries and invasive species management by driving species range shifts. The dynamic nature of these threats means that the future of our oceans will depend...

Our understanding of marine ecosystems and ability to manage them sustainably has come from multidisciplinary observations made repeatedly over long periods of time. These long‐term ecosystem observations depend on the capabilities of large research vessels, which play an essential role in the collection of global ocean observations. Research vessels serve as large, stable platforms for collecting high volume samples from the...

Plants play a key role in mediating soil response to global change, and breeding or engineering crops to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) storage is a potential route to land‐based carbon dioxide removal in agricultural systems. However, due to limited observational datasets plus shifting paradigms of SOC stabilization, it is unclear which plant traits are most important for enhancing different types of soil organic matter....

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are widely implemented tools for long‐term ocean conservation and resource management. Assessments of MPA performance have largely focused on specific ecosystems individually and have rarely evaluated performance across multiple ecosystems either in an individual MPA or across an MPA network. We evaluated the conservation performance of 59 MPAs in California's large MPA network, which encompasses...