On December 6, 2021, members of Mordecai, Peay, and Fukami Labs had a hybrid meeting, with about 2/3 attending in person in the Bass Biology bulding and 1/3 attending virtually via Zoom, to talk about the papers published in 2021 that we each liked the most. These papers, the best papers of 2021 according to us, are listed below. (If you are curious about the papers we picked in previous years, check out our 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 lists.)

Best papers of 2021


Arthur, W. B. (2021). Foundations of complexity economics. Nature Reviews Physics, 3, 136-145. Link

Averill, C., Werbin, Z. R., Atherton, K. F., Bhatnagar, J. M., & Dietze, M. C. (2021). Soil microbiome predictability increases with spatial and taxonomic scale. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5, 747-756. Link

Bay, R. A., Karp, D. S., Saracco, J. F., Anderegg, W. R. L., Frishkoff, L. O., Wiedenfeld, D., Smith, T. B., & Ruegg, K. (2021). Genetic variation reveals individual-level climate tracking across the annual cycle of a migratory bird. Ecology Letters, 24, 819-828. Link

Bhakuni, H., & Abimbola, S. (2021). Epistemic injustice in academic global health. The Lancet Global Health, 9, e1465-e1470. Link

Brandell, E. E., Dobson, A. P., Hudson, P. J., Cross, P. C., & Smith, D. W. (2021). A metapopulation model of social group dynamics and disease applied to Yellowstone wolves. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118, e2020023118. Link

Brito, A. F., Machado, L. C., Oidtman, R. J., Siconelli, M. J. L., Tran, Q. M., Fauver, J. R., Carvalho, R. D. de O., Dezordi, F. Z., Pereira, M. R., de Castro-Jorge, L. A., Minto, E. C. M., Passos, L. M. R., Kalinich, C. C., Petrone, M. E., Allen, E., España, G. C., Huang, A. T., Cummings, D. A. T., Baele, G., Oliveira Franca, R. F., Lopes da Fonseca, B. A., Perkins, T. A., Wallau, G. L., & Grubaugh, N. D. (2021). Lying in wait: the resurgence of dengue virus after the Zika epidemic in Brazil. Nature Communications, 12, 2619. Link

Delavaux, C. S., Weigelt, P., Dawson, W., Essl, F., van Kleunen, M., König, C., Pergl, J., Pyšek, P., Stein, A., Winter, M., Taylor, A., Schultz, P. A., Whittaker, R. J., Kreft, H., & Bever, J. D. (2021). Mycorrhizal types influence island biogeography of plants. Communications Biology, 4, 1128. Link

Dudney, J., Willing, C. E., Das, A. J., Latimer, A. M., Nesmith, J. C. B., & Battles, J. J. (2021). Nonlinear shifts in infectious rust disease due to climate change. Nature Communications, 12, 5102. Link

Ellis, E. C., Gauthier, N., Klein Goldewijk, K., Bliege Bird, R., Boivin, N., Díaz, S., Fuller, D. Q., Gill, J. L., Kaplan, J. O., Kingston, N., Locke, H., McMichael, C. N. H., Ranco, D., Rick, T. C., Shaw, M. R., Stephens, L., Svenning, J.-C., & Watson, J. E. M. (2021). People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118, e2023483118. Link

Fischhoff, I. R., Castellanos, A. A., Rodrigues, J. P. G. L. M., Varsani, A., & Han, B. A. (2021). Predicting the zoonotic capacity of mammals to transmit SARS-CoV-2. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288, 20211651. Link

Grainger, T. N., Senthilnathan, A., Ke, P.-J., Barbour, M. A., Jones, N. T., DeLong, J. P., Otto, S. P., O'Connor, M. I., Coblentz, K. E., Goel, N., Sakarchi, J., Szojka, M. C., Levine, J. M., & Germain, R. M. (2021). An empiricist's guide to using ecological theory. The American Naturalist, published online. Link

Guzman, A., Montes, M., Hutchins, L., DeLaCerda, G., Yang, P., Kakouridis, A., Dahlquist-Willard, R. M., Firestone, M. K., Bowles, T., & Kremen, C. (2021). Crop diversity enriches arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities in an intensive agricultural landscape. New Phytologist, 231, 447-459. Link

Henriksson, N., Franklin, O., Tarvainen, L., Marshall, J., Lundberg-Felten, J., Eilertsen, L., & Näsholm, T. (2021). The mycorrhizal tragedy of the commons. Ecology Letters, 24, 1215-1224. Link

Hockenberry, A. J., & Wilke, C. O. (2021). BACPHLIP: predicting bacteriophage lifestyle from conserved protein domains. PeerJ, 9, e11396. Link

Jansen, C. C., Darbro, J. M., Birrell, F. A., Shivas, M. A., & van den Hurk, A. F. (2021). Impact of COVID-19 mitigation measures on mosquito-borne diseases in 2020 in Queensland, Australia. Viruses, 13, 1150. Link

Kandlikar, G. S., Yan, X., Levine, J. M., & Kraft, N. J. B. (2021). Soil microbes generate stronger fitness differences than stabilization among California annual plants. The American Naturalist, 197, E30-E39. Link

Kling, M. M., & Ackerly, D. D. (2021). Global wind patterns shape genetic differentiation, asymmetric gene flow, and genetic diversity in trees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118, e2017317118. Link

Kyriazis, C. C., Wayne, R. K., & Lohmueller, K. E. (2021). Strongly deleterious mutations are a primary determinant of extinction risk due to inbreeding depression. Evolution Letters, 5, 33-47. Link

Levin, D., Raab, N., Pinto, Y., Rothschild, D., Zanir, G., Godneva, A., Mellul, N., Futorian, D., Gal, D., Leviatan, S., Zeevi, D., Bachelet, I., & Segal, E. (2021). Diversity and functional landscapes in the microbiota of animals in the wild. Science, 372, eabb5352. Link

MacPherson, A., Keeling, M. J., & Otto, S. P. (2021). Coevolution fails to maintain genetic variation in a host-parasite model with constant finite population size. Theoretical Population Biology, 137, 10-21. Link

Russell, K. A., & McFrederick, Q. S. (2021). Elevated temperature may affect nectar microbes, nectar sugars, and bumble bee foraging preference. Microbial Ecology, published online. Link

Shik, J. Z., Kooij, P. W., Donoso, D. A., Santos, J. C., Gomez, E. B., Franco, M., Crumière, A. J. J., Arnan, X., Howe, J., Wcislo, W. T., & Boomsma, J. J. (2021). Nutritional niches reveal fundamental domestication trade-offs in fungus-farming ants. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5, 122-134. Link

Utarini, A., Indriani, C., Ahmad, R. A., Tantowijoyo, W., Arguni, E., Ansari, M. R., Supriyati, E., Wardana, D. S., Meitika, Y., Ernesia, I., Nurhayati, I., Prabowo, E., Andari, B., Green, B. R., Hodgson, L., Cutcher, Z., Rancès, E., Ryan, P. A., O'Neill, S. L., Dufault, S. M., Tanamas, S. K., Jewell, N. P., Anders, K. L., & Simmons, C. P. for the AWED Study Group (2021). Efficacy of Wolbachia-infected mosquito deployments for the control of dengue. New England Journal of Medicine, 384, 2177-2186. Link

van Heerwaarden, B., & Sgrò, C. M. (2021). Male fertility thermal limits predict vulnerability to climate warming. Nature Communications, 12, 2214. Link