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Understanding the differences in fine-root traits among different species is essential to gain a detailed understanding of resource conservation and acquisition strategies of plants. We aimed to explore whether certain root traits are consistent among subsets of species and characterize species together into meaningful community groups. We selected 11 woody species from different microbial symbiotic...
Water shortage events negatively impact plant productivity, threaten ecosystem functioning, and are predicted to increase dramatically in the coming years. Consequently, building a detailed understanding of how plants respond to water stress is critical for improving predictions of ecological processes and species range shifts under climate change. Here, we characterized patterns of intraspecific...
Predicting the effects of predator diversity loss on food webs is challenging, because predators can both consume and induce behavioral responses in their prey (i.e., non-consumptive effects or NCEs). Studies manipulating predator diversity and investigating NCEs are rare, especially in marine systems. Recently, a severe outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome (SSWS) on the west coast of North America...
The relative importance of stochastic- and niche-based processes shifts during successional time and across different types of habitats. Microbial biofilms are known to undergo such successional shifts. However, little is known about the interaction between these successional trajectories and habitat filters. Harsh habitat filters could affect biofilm successional trajectories by strengthening niche-based...
Nitrogen deposition in the northeastern US changed N availability in the latter part of the twentieth century, with potential legacy effects. However, long-term N cycle measurements are scarce. N isotopes in tree rings have been used as an indicator of N availability through time, but there is little verification of whether species differ in the strength of this signal. Using long-term records at...
Herbivore attack can alter plant interactions with pollinators, ranging from reduced to enhanced pollinator visitation. The direction and strength of effects of herbivory on pollinator visitation could be contingent on the type of plant tissue or organ attacked by herbivores, but this has seldom been tested experimentally. We investigated the effect of variation in feeding site of herbivorous insects...
An animal’s diet contributes to its survival and reproduction. Variation in diet can alter the structure of community-level consumer-resource networks, with implications for ecological function. However, much remains unknown about the underlying drivers of diet breadth. Here we use a network approach to understand how consumer diet changes in response to local and landscape context and how these patterns...
A classic question in evolutionary biology is whether behavioral flexibility hastens or hinders evolutionary change. The latter idea, that behavior reduces the number of environmental states experienced by an organism and buffers that organism against selection, has been dubbed the “Bogert Effect” after Charles Bogert, the biologist who first popularized the phenomenon using data from lizards. The...
Carbon isotopes are commonly used in trophic ecology to estimate consumer diet composition. This estimation is complicated by the fact that lipids exhibit a more depleted carbon signature (δ13C) than other macromolecules, and are often found at different concentrations among individual organisms. Some researchers argue that lipids bias diet reconstructions using stable isotopes and should be accounted...
Spatial patterns can inform us of forest recruitment, mortality, and tree interactions through time and disturbance. Specifically, successional trajectories of self-thinning and heterospecific negative density dependence can be interpreted from the spatial arrangement of forest stems. We conducted a 50-year spatial analysis of a forest undergoing succession at the ecotone of the southwestern Canadian...
The persistence and distribution of species under changing climates can be affected by both direct effects of the environment and indirect effects via biotic interactions. However, the relative importance of direct and indirect climate effects on recruitment stages is poorly understood. We conducted a manipulative experiment to test the multiway interaction of direct and competition-mediated effects...
Freshwater springs are important ecosystems. In the arid regions of North America, groundwater extraction has caused the desiccation of springs and the extinction of taxa. To better describe the biodiversity of freshwater springs in the hope of establishing a sensitive approach for monitoring the predicted change in spring systems, we used high-resolution genetic methods to estimate the alpha and...
The gene Clock is a key part of the Core Circadian Oscillator, and the length of the polyglutamine (poly-Q) repeat sequence in Clock (ClkpolyQcds) has been proposed to be associated with the timing of annual cycle events in birds. We tested whether variation in ClkpolyQcds corresponds to variation in migration timing in the bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica baueri), a species in which individuals...
Why are some mammals more vulnerable to extinction than others? Past studies have explored many life history traits as correlates of extinction, but have not been successful at developing a unified understanding of why some species become extinct while other species persist despite living at the same time, under similar conditions, and facing equivalent challenges. I propose that the lens of wildlife...
Recently, community ecology has emphasized the multi-facetted aspects of biological diversity by linking species traits and the environment. Here, we explored environmental correlates of taxonomically-based and traits-based compositional distances using a comprehensive data set of diatom and macroinvertebrate communities. We also explored the responses of different beta diversity components (i.e.,...
Telomere dynamics vary fundamentally between endothermic populations and species as a result of differences in life history, yet we know little about these patterns in ectotherms. In ectotherms, the relationships between climate, metabolism and life history suggest that telomere attrition should be higher at relatively high environmental temperatures compared to relatively low environmental temperatures,...
In addition to direct mortality, predators can have indirect effects on prey populations by affecting prey behaviour or physiology. For example, predator presence can increase stress hormone levels, which can have physiological costs. Stress exposure accelerates the shortening of telomeres (i.e. the protective caps of chromosomes) and shorter telomeres have been linked to increased mortality risk...
Climatic conditions, trophic links between species and dispersal may induce spatial synchrony in population fluctuations. Spatial synchrony increases the extinction risk of populations and, thus, it is important to understand how synchrony-inducing mechanisms affect populations already threatened by habitat loss and climate change. For many species, it is unclear how population fluctuations vary over...
Temperature is one of the most influential drivers of physiological performance and behaviour in ectotherms, determining how these animals relate to their ecosystems and their ability to succeed in particular habitats. Here, we analysed the largest set of acceleration data compiled to date for elasmobranchs to examine the relationship between volitional activity and temperature in 252 individuals...
Plant species can be characterized by different growth strategies related to their inherent growth and recovery rates, which shape their responses to stress and disturbance. Ecosystem engineering, however, offers an alternative way to cope with stress: modifying the environment may reduce stress levels. Using an experimental study on two seagrass species with contrasting traits, the slow-growing Zostera marina...
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