Governments must halt vulture poisoning, Pablo I. Plaza, Sergio. A. Lambertucci

Early giant reveals faster evolution of large body size in ichthyosaurs than in cetaceans A 244-million-year-old fossil of a massive ichthyosaur suggests that there was a burst of gigantism in the group after the Permian extinction.

Plant functional adaptations, water use strategies, and soil interactions determinedrought impact and recovery in forests.

Dilara Arslan, Anthony Olivier, Lisa Ernoul, Arnaud Béchet & Kerim Çiçek

Nicolaos Kassinis & Iris Charalambidou

Dossier : Une décennie après Aichi. Le bilan contrasté des objectifs mondiaux sur les aires protégées Par Victor Cazalis

Dossier : La création d’aires protégées. Analyse des engagements français et européens Par Bernard Chevassus-au-Louis, Rémi Luglia

Point de vue : Les centres de soins pour la faune en détresse en France.

Au chevet d’une société qui souffre de son rapport au sauvage Par Manon Tissidre, Jean-François Courreau

Ayfer Şirin & Eyup Başkale

Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and landscape restoration. Poorter et al. analyzed the patterns of recovery in forest attributes (related to soil, plant functioning, structure, and diversity) in 77 secondary forest sites in the Americas and West Africa. They found that different attributes recovered at different rates, with soil recovering in less than a decade and species diversity and biomass recovering in little more than a century. The authors discuss how these findings can be applied in efforts to promote forest restoration. —

The long, narrow leaves of grasses look rather different from the often shorter, flatter leaves of eudicot plants. Richardson et al. combined developmental genetics and computational modeling to reveal that these two types of leaves, which are widely separated by evolution, have more in common than expected. Expression of similar patterning genes in the primordial zone is confined to a wedge for the eudicot leaf but expanded to concentric domains in the grass leaf, driving development of the cylindrical, encircling sheath characteristic of grass leaves. Addition or removal of gene expression in a marginal zone contributes to the development of the broader leaf characteristic of eudicots. Thus, grass and eudicot leaves are diversified elaborations of shared toolkits.

Kyle D. Kittelberger, Evan R. Buechley, Michael Ford, Kayahan Ağırkaya & Çağan Hakkı Şekercioğlu