Spatial cognitive abilities allow individuals to remember the location of resources such as food patches, predator hide-outs, or shelters. Animals typically incorporate learnt spatial information or use external environmental cues to navigate their surroundings. A spectacular example of how some fishes move is through aerial jumping. For instance, fish that are trapped within isolated pools, cut off from the main body of water during dry periods, may jump over obstacles and direct their jumps to...

1. Apple is one of the most widely cultivated fruit crops worldwide, and apple yield benefits from pollination by insects. The global decline in wild pollinator populations raises concern about the adequacy of pollination services in apple production. 2. Here, we present a global meta-analysis of pollination in apple. We assembled from the literature a dataset comprising results of 48 studies across five continents on fruit set and seed set in apple with insect pollination,...

Additional file 6. Dataset2_script.R: An R script illustrating how Data set 2 was processed with PolyHaplotyper, and how the comparisons with SATlotyper and Happy_inf were made.

Additional file 2: zip. GenBank files of plasmids used in this study, including: ppta-acka-atf1.gb, ppta-acka-eat1.gb, ppta-acka-treat1.gb, precas1-ald.gb, pthl-atf1.gb, SIBR-Cas pta.gb.

An increasing demand for pollination services highlights the need for research on alternative pollinators for greenhouse and open field food crops. We compared the foraging behaviour and effectiveness of seven endemic African Meliponinae (Meliponula bocandei, Dactylurina schmidti, Plebeina hildebrandti, Meliponula lendliana, Hypotrigona gribodoi, Meliponula ferruginea, Meliponula togoensis) as alternative pollinators to honey bees of greenhouse cultivated Cantaloupe melons. It was observed that honey bees started foraging sooner after introduction in the greenhouse (av. 4 days)...

The use of biologging and tracking devices is widespread in avian behavioural and ecological studies. Carrying these devices rarely has major behavioural or fitness effects in the wild, yet it may still impact animals in more subtle ways, such as during high power demanding escape manoeuvres. Here, we tested whether or not great tits (Parus major) carrying a backpack radio-tag changed their body-mass or flight behaviour over time to compensate for the detrimental effect of...

Indiscriminate fire is rampant throughout subtropical South and Southeast Asian grasslands. However, very little is known about the role of fire and pyric herbivory on the functioning of highly productive subtropical monsoon grasslands lying within Cwa-climatic region. We collected grass samples from 60 m x 60 m plots and determined vegetation physical and chemical properties at regular 30-day intervals from April to July 2020, starting from 30 days after fire to assess post-fire regrowth forage...

Understanding how much inorganic fertilizer (referred to as fertilizer) is applied to different crops at national, regional and global levels is an essential component of fertilizer consumption analysis and demand projection. Good information on fertilizer use by crop (FUBC) is rarely available because it is difficult to collect and time-consuming to process and validate. To fill this gap, a first global FUBC report was published in 1992 for the 1990/1991 period, based on an expert...

The increasing disturbances in monocultures around the world are testimony to their instability under global change. Many studies have claimed that temporal stability of productivity increase with species richness, although the ecological fundaments have mainly been investigated through diversity experiments. To adequately manage forest ecosystems, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the effect of mixing species on the temporal stability of productivity and the way in which this it is influenced by...

It is generally assumed that the dependence of conventional agriculture on artificial fertilizers and pesticides strongly impacts the environment, while organic agriculture relying more on microbial functioning may mitigate these impacts. However, it is not well known how microbial diversity and community composition change in conventionally managed farmers’ fields that are converted to organic management. Here, we sequenced bacterial and fungal communities of 34 organic fields on sand and marine clay soils in a time...

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common complication of sepsis and increase morbidity and mortality. Long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) GAS6-AS2 was related to inflammation and apoptosis in different diseases by regulating miRNAs and downstream genes, but its role in AKI remains unclear. Thus, we speculated that GAS6-AS2 might function in sepsis-related AKI via regulating target genes. Here, LPS or CLP was used to establish in vitro or in vivo sepsis-related AKI model. The interactions between...

Plastic take-out food containers may release microplastics (MPs) into food and pose a potential risk to food safety and human health. Here, after being subjected to hot water treatment, MPs released from three types of plastic food containers (polypropylene, PP; polyethylene, PE; expanded polystyrene, EPS) were identified by micro-Raman spectroscopy. The results showed that the size of released MPs ranged from 0.8–38 μm and over 96% MPs were smaller than 10 μm. Various MPs concentrations...

Radial stem growth dynamics at seasonal resolution are essential to understand how forests respond to climate change. We studied daily radial growth of 160 individuals of seven temperate tree species at 47 sites across Switzerland over eight years. Growth of all species peaked in the early part of the growth season and commenced shortly before the summer solstice, but with species-specific seasonal patterns. Day length set a window of opportunity for radial growth. Within this...

Understanding vulnerabilities of plant populations to climate change could help preserve their biodiversity and reveal new elite parents for future breeding programs. To this end, landscape genomics is a useful approach for assessing putative adaptations to future climatic conditions, especially in long-lived species such as trees. We conducted a population genomics study of 207 Coffea canephora trees from seven forests along different climate gradients in Uganda. For this, we sequenced 323 candidate genes involved in...

Organic farming supports higher biodiversity than conventional farming, but at the cost of lower yields. We conducted a meta-analysis quantifying the trade-off between biodiversity and yield, comparing conventional and organic farming. We developed a compatibility index to assess whether biodiversity gains from organic farming exceed yield losses, and a substitution index to assess whether organic farming would increase biodiversity in an area if maintaining total production under organic farming would require cultivating more land at...

Predicting forest recovery at landscape scales will aid forest restoration efforts. The first step in successful forest recovery is tree recruitment. Forecasts of tree recruit abundance, derived from the landscape-scale distribution of seed sources (i.e. adult trees), could assist efforts to identify sites with high potential for natural regeneration. However, previous work has revealed wide variation in the effect of seed sources on seedling abundance, from positive to no effect. We quantified the relationship between...

Revealing the ecological consequences of bark multifunctionality and its underlying traits has become a relatively new but essential focus in plant ecology. Although the enormous differences between the most crucial bark layers, i.e., inner and outer bark, in structure and functions have been widely recognized, the overall bark has been regarded as a homogenous tissue in most bark-related studies. This has led to poor knowledge on the functional independence, specialized contributions and possible linkages of...

Drought events may reduce growth and survival of conifer trees. The effects of the intensity and timing of drought on the growth resilience, including growth reductions during drought and recovery of growth after drought, remains however highly uncertain. Growth resilience of 20 conifer species to 11 dry years was compared in a common garden experiment. We assessed 1) the relationships among growth resistance, recovery and resilience, 2) the impacts of different drought dimensions (intensity, onset...

This study investigated the pharmacological mechanism of kaempferol in the treatment of oxaliplatin-induced neuropathic pain by network pharmacological method and cells experiment. The kaempferol and disease target genes were obtained from several databases, including TCMSP, SwissTargetPrediction, GeneCards, and CTD. Then, the common target genes of drugs and diseases were obtained using Venny online tools. Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) functional analyses were carried out to obtain the enriched molecular...

We steered the soil microbiome via applications of organic residues (mix of cover crop residues, sewage sludge + compost, and digestate + compost) to enhance multiple ecosystem services in line with climate-smart agriculture. Our result highlights the potential to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from agricultural soils by the application of specific organic amendments (especially digestate + compost). Unexpectedly, also the addition of mineral fertilizer in our mesocosms led to similar combined GHG emissions than...

Parasitoids lay their eggs in or on a host, usually another insect. During foraging, parasitoids can encounter insects that differ in terms of host suitability and quality. At one extreme end of this spectrum are non-hosts that are unsuitable for offspring development. Non-hosts are generally ignored but parasitization does occur and occasionally also results in egg deposition. Here, we investigate how oviposition in a non-host influences subsequent foraging behaviour of a parasitoid and whether this...

The structure of forest mammal communities appears surprisingly consistent across the continental tropics, presumably due to convergent evolution in similar environments. Whether such consistency extends to mammal occupancy, despite variation in species characteristics and context, remains unclear. Here we ask whether we can predict occupancy patterns and, if so, whether these relationships are consistent across biogeographic regions. Specifically, we assessed how mammal feeding guild, body mass and ecological specialization relate to occupancy in protected forests...

Additional file 6. Dataset2_script.R: An R script illustrating how Data set 2 was processed with PolyHaplotyper, and how the comparisons with SATlotyper and Happy_inf were made.

Additional file 8. Dataset3_script.R: An R script illustrating how Data set 3 was processed with PolyHaplotyper, and how the comparisons with SATlotyper and Happy_inf were made.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Details on studied forest sites. Table S2. The qPCR protocol for detection of tick symbionts and pathogens. Table S3. Bacterial loads of samples for the 16S rRNA sequencing; sample scheme. Table S4. Details on a positive control, primers, protocol, and in silico analysis used in the 16S rRNA quantification analyses. Table S5. OTU table. Table S6. Prevalence of veritcally and horizontally transmitted symbionts and pathogens per location. Table S7. Expected...