Natural selection

Paul Nurse

Application of microbial inoculants significantly  enhances crop productivity: A meta-analysis of studies from 2010 to 2020

Li et al, 2022

Abstract

Introduction

With the rapid development of microbial technology, microbial inoculant is considered as a promising tool in sustainable agricultural systems. Mechanisms by which microbial inoculants improve crop yield include improving plant nutrient availability and alleviating abiotic/biotic stresses (e.g., drought, salt and disease). However, the field efficacy of microbial inoculants remains inconsistent, which constrains large-scale adoptions. Identity of dominant mechanisms that underpin the positive impacts of different microbial inoculants is limited. Thus, a comprehensive quantitative assessment of known inoculants on crop performance is needed to provide guidance for the development of effective microbial tools from both research and commercial perspectives.

Materials and Methods

Based on 97 peer-reviewed publications, we conducted a meta-analysis to quantify the benefits of different microbial inoculants on crop yield, and to identify the key mechanisms that underpin enhanced crop yield.

Results

Result showed that (i) alleviation of stresses was the major mechanism (53.95%, n = 53) by which microbial inoculants enhance crop yield, while improving plant nutrient availability accounted for 22.25% (n = 58) of crop yield enhancement. (ii) Pseudomonas was the most effective microbial inoculant in enhancing crop yield through alleviating stresses (63.91%, n = 15), whereas Enterobacter was the most effective in improving plant nutrient availability (27.12%, n = 5). (iii) Considering both mechanisms together, Pseudomonas (49.94%, n = 21), Enterobacter (27.55%, n = 13) and Bacillus (25.66%, n = 32) were the largest sources of microbial inoculants to enhance crop yield, and the combination of diazotroph Burkholderia with its legume host had the highest effect on improving the yield (by 196.38%). Microbial inoculants also improve nutritional quality by enhancing mineral contents in the produce.

Conclusion

Our analysis provides evidence that microbial inoculants can enhance agricultural productivity and nutritional quality and can be used either alone or in combination with reduced amount of agrochemicals to promote sustainable agriculture.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sae2.12028

Revisiting the cry-for-help hypothesis in plant–microbe interactions

Tharp et al., 2025

The ‘cry-for-help hypothesis’ (CHH) is broadly used to study how root exudate modulation under stress influences recruitment of beneficial microbes in the rhizosphere. Here, we explored common misconceptions and limitations of the CHH and advocate for the reassessment of this prevalent hypothesis to unfold the ecological complexities of plant–microbe interactions.

https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/abstract/S1360-1385(25)00223-7

Linalool-triggered plant-soil feedback drives defense adaptation in dense maize plantings

Guo et al., 2025

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Planting crops more densely increases overall yields, but it also raises the risk of pest and pathogen outbreaks. Although plants can modify their architecture to adapt to crowded conditions, how they adjust their immune responses remains largely unknown. Understanding how plants manage these trade-offs is critical for sustainable agriculture, especially in the context of increasing global food demands.

RATIONALE

Plants release chemical cues, such as volatiles, that inform neighbors of environmental conditions. One such compound, linalool, is a constitutively emitted leaf volatile in maize and other grasses. We hypothesized that linalool could act as a signal in densely planted fields, triggering plant-soil feedback that prepares neighboring plants for potential biotic stress. We explored how linalool shapes root signaling, soil microbiota, and ultimately plant defense and growth.

RESULTS

Field surveys revealed that maize plants in the inner rows of densely planted fields suffered less herbivore damage than those at the edges but that they also had reduced growth. Laboratory soil–transplantation experiments confirmed that soils conditioned by high-density plantings decreased plant biomass while enhancing resistance to insects, nematodes, and pathogens. These effects extended across genotypes and species.

Volatile profiling identified linalool as a key compound increasing with planting density. Exposure of maize to synthetic linalool reproduced the feedback effects, which required the presence of a living plant. Mechanistically, linalool activated jasmonate signaling in roots and up-regulated genes that drive the biosynthesis and exudation of the specialized metabolite HDMBOA-Glc. This exudate reshaped the rhizosphere microbiome, selectively enriching bacteria that suppressed plant growth but increased resistance in subsequently grown plants. Soil sterilization and microbial inoculation confirmed that these microbes were essential for the feedback loop.

In plants grown in linalool-conditioned soil, defense-related signaling, particularly salicylic acid signaling, was up-regulated, whereas growth-promoting metabolic pathways were down-regulated. Plants lacking salicylic acid signaling did not show growth-defense trade-offs, confirming salicylic acid’s role in expressing the feedback-triggered defense.

CONCLUSION

This study uncovers a volatile-triggered feedback mechanism through which maize adapts its defense in crowded environments. The constitutive emission of linalool primes neighboring plants by activating root jasmonate signaling, promoting HDMBOA-Glc exudation, and altering the rhizosphere microbiome. This, in turn, leads to elevated defense and suppressed growth in subsequent plants through salicylic acid signaling. These findings shed light on how plants integrate aboveground cues and belowground processes to optimize defense in high-density settings. Harnessing this natural defense pathway through breeding, microbial inoculants, or synthetic biology could enable the development of crops that are more resilient and require fewer chemical inputs.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv6675

The Bird and The Tree 

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Law of complexity  

Robert Hazen and Michael Wong

Plant sap analysis

Joel Williams

Maximum Entropy is a Foundation for Complexity Science

John Harte

 CÓMO GENERAR CRÉDITOS DE CARBONO

 The Hive Architect | Saving Britain's Wild Bees

 Myth of the Machine: Lewis Mumford

Farmer-led Research on Europe’s Full Productivity

This report presents the results of the first phase of European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA) ongoing farmer-led research program, introducing a groundbreaking way to measure real-world agricultural success through the Regenerating Full Productivity (RFP) index. Developed with and for farmers, the RFP captures both agronomic and ecological performance in a single, practical tool.

Tested across 14 countries from 2021 to 2023, this first phase reveals compelling results:

• +33% higher full productivity on average, with gains up to 52.

• Stronger ecosystem performance, with over 25% more photosynthesis, 24% more soil cover, and 16% greater plant diversity.

• Yield parity with major input reduction: Regenerating farms achieved, on average, only a 2% lower yield (in kilocalories and protein), while using 61% less synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and 75% less pesticides and making 20% higher gross margin per hectare.

• Regional food sovereignty: While average EU farms import over 30% of livestock feed from outside the EU, pioneering farmers achieved similar yields using feed exclusively from Europe.

Full Report:

https://eara.farm/wp-content/uploads/EARA_Farmer-led-Research-on-Europes-Full-Productivity_2025_06_03.pdf

Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation

Hultgren et al., 2025

Climate change threatens global food systems, but the extent to which adaptation will reduce losses remains unknown and controversial. Even within the well-studied context of US agriculture, some analyses argue that adaptation will be widespread and climate damages small, whereas others conclude that adaptation will be limited and losses severe. Scenario-based analyses indicate that adaptation should have notable consequences on global agricultural productivity, but there has been no systematic study of how extensively real-world producers actually adapt at the global scale. Here we empirically estimate the impact of global producer adaptations using longitudinal data on six staple crops spanning 12,658 regions, capturing two-thirds of global crop calories. We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001). We project that adaptation and income growth alleviate 23% of global losses in 2050 and 34% at the end of the century (6% and 12%, respectively; moderate-emissions scenario), but substantial residual losses remain for all staples except rice. In contrast to analyses of other outcomes that project the greatest damages to the global poor, we find that global impacts are dominated by losses to modern-day breadbaskets with favourable climates and limited present adaptation, although losses in low-income regions losses are also substantial. These results indicate a scale of innovation, cropland expansion or further adaptation that might be necessary to ensure food security in a changing climate.

a–f, Colours indicate central estimate in a high-emissions scenario (RCP 8.5), net of adaptation costs and benefits, for maize (a), soybean (b), rice (c), wheat (d), cassava (e) and sorghum (f) for 2089–2098. Projections computed for 24,378 subnational units relative to counterfactual yields, uncropped regions are shaded in grey. Wheat shows winter wheat and spring wheat projections combined, weighted by their area share in each region. Estimates in each location are ensemble means across climate and statistical uncertainty. Incomes from SSP3.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w

The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand 

Johan Rockström

Les invasions biologiques 

Franck Courchamp

 Peter Singer: Animal suffering is human responsibility

Regenerative agriculture: The evidence 

British Ecological Society

Life in Syntropy 

What's Happening At Göbekli Tepe

An update with Field Director Dr Lee Clare

Soil microbial effects on plant community responses to fire in longleaf pine savannas

Anita Simha and Gaurav Kandlikar

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

Steffen et al., 2018

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the hotter Anthropocene. The fork in the road is shown here as the two divergent pathways of the Earth System in the future (broken arrows). Currently, the Earth System is on a Hothouse Earth pathway driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases and biosphere degradation toward a planetary threshold at ∼2 °C, beyond which the system follows an essentially irreversible pathway driven by intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks. The other pathway leads to Stabilized Earth, a pathway of Earth System stewardship guided by human-created feedbacks to a quasistable, human-maintained basin of attraction. “Stability” (vertical axis) is defined here as the inverse of the potential energy of the system. Systems in a highly stable state (deep valley) have low potential energy, and considerable energy is required to move them out of this stable state. Systems in an unstable state (top of a hill) have high potential energy, and they require only a little additional energy to push them off the hill and down toward a valley of lower potential energy

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Global Food Quantity and Diversity to Drop by More than Half with Our Accelerated Climate Warming

Paul Beckwith

The formal demography of kinship: Demographic stochasticity in the kinship network

Hal Caswell

Le hasard pris sur l'aile, préservé, reproduit par la machinerie de l'invariance et ainsi converti en ordre, règle et nécessité. Un processus totalement aveugle peut par définition conduire à n'importe quoi ; il peut même conduire à la vision elle-même.

Jacques Monod. 1970. Le Hasard et la Nécessité : Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, coll. 

 The Secret Language of Plants: The Incredible Intelligence of Plants

Birdsong

“𝘐 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴, 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴; 𝘐 𝘴𝘮𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘱𝘪𝘱𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥...”

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 288-89.

 

En esta lista de videos se explora la importancia que tienen las interacciones ecológicas en el funcionamiento de los ecosistemas. Se parte de los casos más simples y conocidos, para posteriormente ir explorando fenómenos menos conocidos y más complejos.

Lista completa de videos:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAVCc09jUR88NecBkTEDk2Mjp2QEhTk0x

.

 Contingent Agencies // Tim Ingold

The Origins of Modern Maize - Jeff Ross-Ibara

Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle

Chris Fields aand Michael Levin

We argue here that the Origin of Life (OOL) problem is not just a chemistry problem but is also, and primarily, a cognitive science problem. When interpreted through the lens of the Conway-Kochen theorem and the Free Energy Principle, contemporary physics characterizes all complex dynamical systems that persist through time as Bayesian agents. If all persistent systems are to some – perhaps only minimal – extent cognitive, are all persistent systems to some extent alive, orare living systems only a subset of cognitive systems? We argue that no bright line can be drawn, and we re-assess, from this perspective, the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation. We conclude that improving our abilities to recognize and communicate with diverse intelligences in diverse embodiments, whether based on familiar biochemistry or not, will either resolve or obviate the OOL problem.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19420889.2025.2466017

 Soundscape Ecology ::: Bernie Kraus

Endless forms most beautiful…

 

WILD CLOCKS 

by David Farrier

Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live.

Pile o’Sápmi Supreme

In every living thing, there ticks a clock. “Lodged in all is a set metronome,” wrote W. H. Auden: when May comes round, birds “still in the egg, click to each other ‘Hatch!’” and “October’s nip” is the signal for trees to release their leaves.

Once, these rhythms comforted and consoled, orchestrating innumerable ecological relationships and offering glimpses of the greater wheels within which our small lives turn. But as climate breakdown takes hold, more and more species are struggling to keep time as they once did. Biological clocks that evolved an exact synchronization over millions of years are falling out of sync: the beat does not fall where it should; syncopation becomes dissonance. Failing wild clocks are resulting in misalignments in time between predators and prey, herbivores and plants, or flowers and pollinators. The results can be catastrophic, as breeding seasons fail and the long-held relationships that weave species together around shared needs fray. In Australia, mountain pygmy possums are leaving hibernation before the emergence of their preferred food, the bogong moth, risking starvation. Plants are losing touch with their pollinators: warm springs in Japan have led to earlier flowering of spring-ephemeral plants relative to their pollinating bees. One study warns that the timing of phytoplankton blooms could be shortened if the oceans continue to warm, introducing a calamitous mismatch at the very base of the marine food chain.

In a time of ecological crisis, it can be difficult to know exactly what time it really is.

Continue reading:

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/wild-clocks/

These Lizards Have Been Playing Rock-Paper-Scissors for 15 Million Years

Winds of Change - Breathing a New Disciplinary Matrix Into Biology 

Seth Bordenstein

Haulout 

Maxim Arbugaev, Evgenia Arbugaeva (2022)

Understanding Relationships and Ecology 

Fritjof Capra 

How trees eat salmon: The circle of life, explained 

Sean B. Carroll