Orchidaceae, one of the largest plant families, have been predicted in several analyses to be under a higher level of threat than angiosperms as a whole. Despite this, compared to many other major groups of animals and plants, orchids are under-represented on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Since 2000, concerted efforts have led to the number of orchids on the Global Red List incr...

Coral reefs around Sri Lanka have coexisted with human communities for thousands of years and are a continual source of food, economic productivity, and tourism. Although these reef systems sustain nearby populations, little is known about the presence or functional role of microbial communities on reefs dominated by hard corals or fleshy algae. Coral reef benthos cover was recorded, and reef-associated water samples were coll...

One mechanism giving fleshy algae a competitive advantage over corals during reef degradation is algal-induced and microbially-mediated hypoxia (typically less than 69.5 µmol oxygen L −1 ). During hypoxic conditions oxygen availability becomes insufficient to sustain aerobic respiration in most metazoans. Algae are more tolerant of low oxygen conditions and may outcompete corals weakened by hypoxia. A key question on the ecolo...

All organisms host a diversity of associated viruses, bacteria, and protists, collectively defined as the holobiont. While scientific advancements have enhanced the understanding of the functional roles played by various components of the holobiont, there is a growing need to integrate multiple types of molecular data into spatially and temporally resolved frameworks. To that end, we mapped 16S and 18S rDNA metabarcoding, meta...

Temporal stability of ecosystem functioning increases the predictability and reliability of ecosystem services, and understanding the drivers of stability across spatial scales is important for land management and policy decisions. We used species‐level abundance data from 62 plant communities across five continents to assess mechanisms of temporal stability across spatial scales. We assessed how asynchrony (i.e. different uni...

Understanding the drivers of population divergence, speciation and species persistence is of great interest to molecular ecology, especially for species‐rich radiations inhabiting the world's biodiversity hotspots. The toolbox of population genomics holds great promise for addressing these key issues, especially if genomic data are analysed within a spatially and ecologically explicit context. We have studied the earliest stag...

Summary Oxygen minimum zones ( OMZs ) are oceanographic features that affect ocean productivity and biodiversity, and contribute to ocean nitrogen loss and greenhouse gas emissions. Here we describe the viral communities associated with the E astern T ropical S outh P acific ( ETSP ) OMZ off I quique, C hile for the first time through abundance estimates and viral metagenomic analysis. The viral‐to‐microbial ratio ( VMR ) in t...