biodiversity

For decades, researchers have commonly assumed that higher oxygen levels led to the sudden diversification of animal life 540 million years ago. But one iconoclast argues the opposite: that new animal behaviors raised oxygen levels and remade the environment.

Modelers find evidence that a combination of competition, predation and evolution will push ecosystems toward species diversity anywhere in the universe.

The legendary marine biologist discusses why she’s excited about the coming era of ocean science, the shortsightedness of maritime exploitation and diving in the Arctic in her 80s.

To assess the ocean’s health, ecology’s “rugged individualists” learned to get with the big data program.

A disarmingly simple model of ecology does everything well — except predict how rapidly nature can change. Can it become more realistic while still avoiding all of biology’s messy complexities?

Nature’s large-scale patterns emerge from incomplete surveys that borrow ideas from information theory.

As science dives headlong into an ocean of data, the demands of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations are growing increasingly acute.