Related Articles

Climate change threatens crop diversity at low latitudes

Climate change alters the climatic suitability of croplands, likely shifting the spatial distribution and diversity of global food crop production. Analyses of future potential food crop diversity have been limited to a small number of crops. Here we project geographical shifts in the climatic niches of 30 major food crops under 1.5–4 °C global warming and assess their impact on current crop production and potential food crop diversity across global croplands. We found that in low-latitude regions, 10–31% of current production would shift outside the climatic niche even under 2 °C global warming, increasing to 20–48% under 3 °C warming. Concurrently, potential food crop diversity would decline on 52% (+2 °C) and 56% (+3 °C) of global cropland. However, potential diversity would increase in mid to high latitudes, offering opportunities for climate change adaptation. These results highlight substantial latitudinal differences in the adaptation potential and vulnerability of the global food system under global warming.

Legacies of temperature fluctuations promote stability in marine biofilm communities

The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate events are driving significant biodiversity shifts across ecosystems. Yet, the extent to which these climate legacies will shape the response of ecosystems to future perturbations remains poorly understood. Here, we tracked taxon and trait dynamics of rocky intertidal biofilm communities under contrasting regimes of warming (fixed vs. fluctuating) and assessed how they influenced stability dimensions in response to temperature extremes. Fixed warming enhanced the resistance of biofilm by promoting the functional redundancy of stress-tolerance traits. In contrast, fluctuating warming boosted recovery rate through the selection of fast-growing taxa at the expense of functional redundancy. This selection intensified a trade-off between stress tolerance and growth further limiting the ability of biofilm to cope with temperature extremes. Anticipating the challenges posed by future extreme events, our findings offer a forward-looking perspective on the stability of microbial communities in the face of ongoing climatic change.

Rapid growth rate responses of terrestrial bacteria to field warming on the Antarctic Peninsula

Ice-free terrestrial environments of the western Antarctic Peninsula are expanding and subject to colonization by new microorganisms and plants, which control biogeochemical cycling. Measuring growth rates of microbial populations and ecosystem carbon flux is critical for understanding how terrestrial ecosystems in Antarctica will respond to future warming. We implemented a field warming experiment in early (bare soil; +2 °C) and late (peat moss-dominated; +1.2 °C) successional glacier forefield sites on the western Antarctica Peninsula. We used quantitative stable isotope probing with H218O using intact cores in situ to determine growth rate responses of bacterial taxa to short-term (1 month) warming. Warming increased the growth rates of bacterial communities at both sites, even doubling the number of taxa exhibiting significant growth at the early site. Growth responses varied among taxa. Despite that warming induced a similar response for bacterial relative growth rates overall, the warming effect on ecosystem carbon fluxes was stronger at the early successional site—likely driven by increased activity of autotrophs which switched the ecosystem from a carbon source to a carbon sink. At the late-successional site, warming caused a significant increase in growth rate of many Alphaproteobacteria, but a weaker and opposite gross ecosystem productivity response that decreased the carbon sink—indicating that the carbon flux rates were driven more strongly by the plant communities. Such changes to bacterial growth and ecosystem carbon cycling suggest that the terrestrial Antarctic Peninsula can respond fast to increases in temperature, which can have repercussions for long-term elemental cycling and carbon storage.

Latent circuit inference from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasks

Higher cortical areas carry a wide range of sensory, cognitive and motor signals mixed in heterogeneous responses of single neurons tuned to multiple task variables. Dimensionality reduction methods that rely on correlations between neural activity and task variables leave unknown how heterogeneous responses arise from connectivity to drive behavior. We develop the latent circuit model, a dimensionality reduction approach in which task variables interact via low-dimensional recurrent connectivity to produce behavioral output. We apply the latent circuit inference to recurrent neural networks trained to perform a context-dependent decision-making task and find a suppression mechanism in which contextual representations inhibit irrelevant sensory responses. We validate this mechanism by confirming the behavioral effects of patterned connectivity perturbations predicted by the latent circuit model. We find similar suppression of irrelevant sensory responses in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys performing the same task. We show that incorporating causal interactions among task variables is critical for identifying behaviorally relevant computations from neural response data.

A year above 1.5 °C signals that Earth is most probably within the 20-year period that will reach the Paris Agreement limit

The temperature goals of the Paris Agreement are measured as 20-year averages exceeding a pre-industrial baseline. The calendar year of 2024 was announced as the first above 1.5 °C relative to pre-industrial levels, but the implications for the corresponding temperature goal are unclear. Here we show that, without very stringent climate mitigation, the first year above 1.5 °C occurs within the first 20-year period with an average warming of 1.5 °C.

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