Nils Chr. Stenseth

University of Oslo · Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis

Habitat alteration and climate change are important threats to terrestrial biodiversity in the tropics. Endorsing flagship or umbrella species can help conserve sympatric biodiversity, restore degraded ecosystems and achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The Ethiopian wolf ( Canis simensis ) is a rare and endemic Ethiopian...

A central and fundamental issue in ecology is to understand the relationship between complexity and stability. Increased empirical evidences demonstrated no clear relationships between complexity metrics and stability, and recent food web loop analyses suggested that maximum loop weight as well as the summation ratio between 3- and 2-link feedback...

Purifying selection is the most pervasive type of selection, as it constantly removes deleterious mutations arising in populations, directly scaling with population size. Highly expressed genes appear to accumulate fewer deleterious mutations between divergent species' lineages, pointing towards gene expression as an additional driver of purifying...

Continually emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern that can evade immune defenses are driving recurrent epidemic waves of COVID-19 globally. However, the impact of measures to contain the virus and their effect on lineage diversity dynamics are poorly understood. Here, we jointly analyzed international travel, public health and social measures (PH...

The incidence of plague has rebounded in the Americas, Asia, and Africa alongside rapid globalization and climate change. Previous studies have shown local climate to have significant nonlinear effects on plague dynamics among rodent communities. We analyzed an 18-year database of plague, spanning 1998 to 2015, in the foci of Mongolia and China to...

The extractive industry consumes vast amounts of energy and is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, its climatic impacts have not yet been fully accounted for. In this study, we estimated the GHG emissions from extractive activities globally with a focus on China, and assessed the main emission drivers. In addition, we pr...

Ensuring global food security and environmental sustainability is dependent upon the contribution of the world's hundred million smallholder farms, but the contributions of smallholder farms to global agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been understudied. We developed a localized agricultural life cycle assessment (LCA) database to cal...

Maestre et al. (Reports, 24 November 2022, p. 915) analyze livestock grazing in global drylands without adequately considering critical ecological, social, and economic variables. Their analysis ignores mobile pastoralism practices and land governance arrangements, critical for sustainable grazing in dry rangelands.

Here, we combine international air travel passenger data with a standard epidemiological model of the initial 3 mo of the COVID-19 pandemic (January through March 2020; toward the end of which the entire world locked down). Using the information available during this initial phase of the pandemic, our model accurately describes the main features of...

Both climate and land-use change have accelerated over the past decades. The cumulative effects of these disruptions are not additive or systematic, rather they pose complex, dynamic environmental challenges to ecological systems. To survive, terrestrial plants and animals will need to shift their distributions to track habitable regions or exhibit...

Since its first identification in 1894 during the third pandemic in Hong Kong, there has been significant progress in understanding the lifestyle of Yersinia pestis , the pathogen that is responsible for plague. Although we now have some understanding of the pathogen’s physiology, genetics, genomics, evolution, gene regulation, pathogenesis and imm...

The life span of leaves increases with their mass per unit area (LMA). It is unclear why. Here, we show that this empirical generalization (the foundation of the worldwide leaf economics spectrum) is a consequence of natural selection, maximizing average net carbon gain over the leaf life cycle. Analyzing two large leaf trait datasets, we show that...

Caused by Yersinia pestis, plague ravaged the world through three known pandemics: the First or the Justinianic (6th-8th century); the Second (beginning with the Black Death during c.1338-1353 and lasting until the 19th century); and the Third (which became global in 1894). It is debatable whether Y. pestis persisted in European wildlife reservoirs...

Although cities are human-dominated systems, they provide habitat for many other species. Because of the lack of long-term observation data, it is challenging to assess the impacts of rapid urbanization on biodiversity in Global South countries. Using multisource data, we provided the first analysis of the impacts of urbanization on bird distributi...

Ethiopia is home to one of the richest and most unique assemblages of fauna and flora on the African continent. Contained within its borders are two major centers of endemism, the mesic Roof of Africa (also known as the Ethiopian Highlands) and the arid Horn of Africa, resulting from the country's varied topography and consequent geographic isolati...

The flourishing logistics in both developed and emerging economies leads to huge greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, however, the emission fluxes are poorly constrained. Here, we constructed a spatial network of logistic GHG emissions based on multi-source big data at continental scale. GHG emissions related to logistics transportation reached 112.14 M...

Mass mortality events are ubiquitous in nature and can be caused by, for example, diseases, extreme weather and human perturbations such as contamination. Despite being prevalent and rising globally, how mass mortality in early life causes population-level effects such as reduced total population biomass, is not fully explored. In particular for fi...

Climate is a major extrinsic factor affecting the population dynamics of many organisms. The Broad-Scale Climate Hypothesis (BSCH) was proposed by Elton to explain the large-scale synchronous population cycles of animals, but the extent of support and whether it differs among taxa and geographical regions is unclear. We reviewed publications examin...

Pathogens can elicit high selective pressure on hosts, potentially altering genetic diversity over short evolutionary timescales. Intraspecific variation in immune response is observable as variable survivability from specific infections. The great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) is a rodent plague host with a heterogenic but highly resistant phenotype....

Temperature profoundly affects ectotherm physiology. Although differential thermal responses influence fitness, thus driving population dynamics and species distributions, our understanding of the molecular architecture underlying these responses is limited, especially during the critical larval stage. Here, using RNA-sequencing of laboratory-reare...

Objective As sequencing technologies become more accessible and bioinformatic tools improve, genomic resources are increasingly available for non-model species. Using a draft genome to guide transcriptome assembly from RNA sequencing data, rather than performing assembly de novo , affects downstream analyses. Yet, direct comparisons of these approa...

Despite a substantial number of COVID‐19 related research papers published, it remains unclear as to which factors are associated with the observed variation in global transmission and what are their relative levels of importance. This study applies a rigorous statistical framework to provide robust estimations of the factor effects for a global an...

Ideally, the practice of science stays independent, informs policy in real time, and facilitates learning. However, when large uncertainties go unreported or are not effectively communicated, science can, inadvertently, facilitate inappropriate politics.This unfortunate circumstance has likely occurred in the case of India’s official tiger (Panther...

Here we propose a classification of age-structured populations according to two features: (1) sensitivity to changes in the intensity of environmental fluctuations and (2) sensitivity to changes in the spectrum of environmental fluctuations.

Numerical demonstration of the phenomenon of stock resonance in an age-structured population

Glossary Transfer function: a continuous function, defined in the frequency domain, that relates the environment-driven fluctuations in demographic parameters (of a specific frequency) to population variations. Variability: the doubled integral of the squared modulus of the transfer function over frequency domain, that quantifies overall effe...

Emerging infectious diseases are one of the greatest public health challenges. Approximately three-quarters of these diseases are of animal origin. These diseases include classical zoonoses maintained in humans only via transmission from other vertebrates (e.g., rabies) and those initiated by a successful one-off zoonotic event (host-switch) in con...

Background The influence of rising global temperatures on malaria dynamics and distribution remains controversial, especially in central highland regions. We aimed to address this subject by studying the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of malaria and the effect of climate change on malaria transmission over 27 years in Hainan, an island province in Ch...

Fluctuations in wild fish populations result from interaction between population dynamics and environmental forcing. Age‐structured populations can magnify or dampen particular frequencies of these fluctuations, depending on life cycle and species traits. The transfer function (TF) gives a detailed analytical description of these phenomena. In this...

The influenza virus mutates and spreads rapidly, making it suitable for studying evolutionary and ecological processes. The ecological factors and processes by which different lineages of influenza compete or coexist within hosts through time and across geographical space are poorly known. We hypothesized that competition would be stronger for infl...

Significance Ecological disruption due to human impacts is evident worldwide, and a key to mitigation lies in characterizing the underlying mechanisms of species and ecosystem stability. Here we show that three extensive “supergenes” are maintained in Atlantic cod by stabilizing selection, tying these genes to the persistence of a keystone species...

Forest loss and degradation are the most significant threats to terrestrial biodiversity in the tropics. Promoting flagship or umbrella species is a strategy that can be used to conserve intact forests and restore degraded ecosystems, conserve biodiversity, and achieve sustainable development goals. The Bale monkey (Chlorocebus djamdjamensis) is an...

The Ethiopian highlands is the largest Afroalpine habitat on the African continent contributing 80 % of the land above 3,000 masl on the continent. The Ethiopian highlands are part of Conservation International's Eastern Afro-Montane Biodiversity Hotspot supporting a large number of endemic mammal and bird species. In the highlands, rodent species...

Collared lemmings (Dicrostonyx) are cold adapted rodents, keystone animals in the tundra communities and the model taxa in studies of Arctic genetic diversity and Quaternary paleontology. We examined mitochondrial and nuclear genomic variation to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships among the Eurasian D. torquatus and North American D. groenlandi...

With open-access publishing authors often pay an article processing charge and subsequently their article is freely available online. These charges are beyond the reach of most African academics. Thus, the trend towards open-access publishing will shift the business model from a pay-wall model, where access to literature is limited, to a pay-to-pub...

The plague of 1630–1632 was one of the deadliest plague epidemics to ever hit Northern Italy, and for many of the affected regions, it was also the last. While accounts on plague during the early 1630s in Florence and Milan are frequent, much less is known about the city of Imola. We analyzed the full skeletal assemblage of four mass graves (n = 13...

Swayne's hartebeest Alcelaphus buselaphus swaynei was once widely distributed in the Horn of Africa. By the early 20th century, however, it was extirpated across most of its range and is now limited to two relict populations in the Ethiopian Rift Valley and categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. In this study, we estimated the size and gen...

Although selecting advantageous sleeping sites is crucial for nonhuman primates, the extent to which different factors contribute to their selection remains largely unknown for many species. We investigated hypotheses relating to predator avoidance, food access, and thermoregulation to explain the sleeping behavior of Bale monkeys ( Chlorocebus dja...

Behavioral responses in wildlife due to human activities may often go unnoticed but have significant effects on population viability. This is a particular concern with endangered species characterized by small population sizes. From June 2016 to May 2017, we measured the effects of human activities on daily the activity budget and home range size o...

Pastoralism is a globally -important livelihood, with large social, environmental and economic importance across much of our planet. Yet, it is also a vulnerable practice with widespread crises, urgently calling for better systemic understanding. The current disciplinary compartmentalization of research not only hampers this but allows perpetuation...

Ongoing climate change threatens biodiversity and directly affects the stability of plant-animal communities. However, it is unclear how the species diversity of biological communities responds to natural climate warming, and whether the temporal stability of biodiversity in the face of climate warming varies with environmental gradients in differe...

With open-access publishing authors pay an article processing charge and subsequently their article is freely available online. These charges are beyond the reach of most African academics. Thus, the trend towards open access publishing will shift the business model from a pay-wall model, where access to literature is limited, to a pay-to-publish o...

Ensuring a more equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide is an effective strategy to control the COVID-19 pandemic and support global economic recovery. Here, we analyze the socioeconomic effects - defined as health gains, lockdown-easing benefit, and supply-chain rebuilding benefit - of a set of idealized vaccine distribution scenarios, by cou...

The number of COVID-19 confirmed cases rapidly grew since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was identified in late 2019. Due to the high transmissibility of this virus, more countries are experiencing the repeated waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with limited manufacturing and distribution of vaccines, control measures might still be the most critical m...

Significance Over the last few years, there has been a great deal of scientific debate regarding whether the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis , spread from a Western European reservoir during the second plague pandemic, or if it repeatedly came to Europe from Asia. Here, we make a synthesis of the available evidence, including genomes of ancient D...

Background Vaccination has the proven effectiveness in reducing disease burden. As the emergency program is moving towards completion in many countries, there is a new urgency to appropriately assess the societal health benefits in both the near and longer term. Methods Using an age-structured mathematical infection model, we evaluate the gains ac...

Open access to the scholarly literature is crucial for African academics but, without urgent action, the move from paywall to pay-to-publish wall will continue to disenfranchise researchers. In an unpublished study, we looked at the 40 journals with the highest impact factors in our field (ecology), and found that the average article-processing c...

Anticipating the medium-and long-term trajectory of pathogen emergence has acquired new urgency given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For many human pathogens, the burden of disease depends on age and previous exposure. Understanding the intersection between human population demography and transmission dynamics is therefore critical. Here, we develo...

Abstract Ethiopian shade coffee plantations are well documented to be bird-friendly and act as refuges for disappearing tree species. The extent to which these plantations support mammal conservation, as well as mammal sensitivity to coffee intensification, remain little studied. We studied the distribution and diversity of mammals under three coff...

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has been characterized by unprecedented rates of spatio-temporal spread. Here, we summarize the main events in the pandemic's timeline and evaluate what has been learnt by the public health community. We also discuss the implications for future public health policy and, specifically...

The endangered Ashy red colobus monkey is rapidly declining mainly due to habitat loss and fragmentation. The largest subpopulation in the Ufipa Plateau is that of the protected Mbizi Forest. Between September 2015 and July 2017, we surveyed unprotected areas of the Ufipa plateau: Mbuzi Forest (comparing our results to those of a survey in 2006), C...

Significance The variability of the Asian summer monsoon (ASM) is important for the functioning of ecological and societal systems at regional to continental scales, but the long-term evolution and interannual variability of this system is not well understood. Here, we present a stable isotope–based reconstruction of ASM variability covering 4680 B...

Anticipating the medium- and long-term trajectory of pathogen emergence has acquired new urgency given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For many human pathogens the burden of disease depends on age and prior exposure. Understanding the intersection between human population demography and transmission dynamics is therefore critical. Here, we develop a...

Populations of large mammals have declined at alarming rates, especially in areas with intensified land use where species can only persist in small habitat fragments. To support conservation planning, we developed habitat suitability models for the Walia ibex (Capra walie), an endangered wild goat endemic to the Simen Mountains, Ethiopia. We calibr...

Ethiopian shade coffee plantations are well documented to be bird-friendly and act as refuges for disappearing tree species. The extent to which these plantations support mammal conservation, as well as mammal sensitivity to coffee intensification, remain little studied. We studied the distribution and diversity of mammals under three coffee manage...

The development of vaccines has opened a way to lower the public health and societal burden of COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve sustainable gains in the long term, switching the vaccination from one target group to a more diverse portfolio should be planned appropriately. We lay out a general mathematical framework for comparing alternative vaccinatio...

Since COVID-19 spread globally in early 2020 and was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March, many countries are managing the local epidemics effectively through intervention measures that limit transmission. The challenges of immigration of new infections into regions and asymptomatic infections remain. Standard determi...

Background Until broad vaccination coverage is reached and effective therapeutics are available, controlling population mobility (ie, changes in the spatial location of a population that affect the spread and distribution of pathogens) is one of the major interventions used to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2. However, population mobility differs...

Pastoralism is globally significant in social, environmental, and economic terms. However, it experiences crises rooted in misconceptions and poor interdisciplinary understanding, while being largely overlooked in international sustainability forums and agendas. Here, we propose a transdisciplinary research approach to understand pastoralist transi...