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The outcomes of interspecific and intraspecific ecological interactions can be considered to fall along continua from cooperative (mutually beneficial) to antagonistic (detrimental to one or both parties). Furthermore, the position of an interaction outcome along the continuum, for example whether a symbiont provides net costs or benefits to its host, or whether two conspecifics cooperatively forage...
Biological invasions are globally affecting ecosystems, causing local species loss and altering ecosystem functioning. Understanding how such biological invasions occur and succeed is thus of high priority. Both local properties and the spatial network structure have been shown to be determinants of invasion success, and the identification of spatial invasion hubs directly promoting invasion dynamics...
Identifying which behavioural strategies maximize individual fitness is a key objective in ecology. Organisms are known to adapt their foraging behaviour to their environment in response to abiotic and biotic constraints, such as the distribution of resources or the presence of competitors. For instance, bees are known to avoid recently visited flowers and thus focus their foraging on more rewarding...
Predators are generally under selective pressure to get better at foraging, leading to steeper functional responses and stronger predator–prey interactions. Yet strong interactions can de‐stabilize food webs, and most interactions across ecological communities are thought to be weak. This conflict between evolutionary and community expectations for the strength of predator–prey interactions represents...
Drought is an important stressor that affects plant growth, survival and physiology and, through plant responses, alters plant–herbivore interactions and herbivore population dynamics. Short‐term drought can occur at different times during a growing season, affecting herbivore populations and plants at various stages of development and growth. As phenology influences drought response, drought timing...
Predators may alter niche overlap between prey species by eliciting divergent anti‐predator behavior. Accordingly, we exploited heterogeneous gray wolf Canis lupus presence in Washington, USA, to contrast patterns of resource and dietary overlap between mule Odocoileus hemionus and white‐tailed deer O. virginianus at sites with and without resident packs. Mule deer run (stot) in a way that is less...
Synchronous dynamics of populations reduces metapopulation persistence. Thus, determining sources of synchrony is important for understanding metapopulations and biodiversity patterns in response to environmental disturbance. Previously, we found that the experimental extinction of two contiguous subpopulations of the butterfly Parnassius smintheus, increased synchrony among nearby subpopulations...
Current analyses of metacommunity data largely focus on global attributes across the entire metacommunity, such as mean alpha, beta, and gamma diversity, as well as the partitioning of compositional variation into single estimates of contributions of space and environmental effects and, more recently, possible contributions of species interactions. However, this view neglects the fact that different...
Climate change affects means, variances and the intrinsic predictability of the climate. However, experimental tests of how changes in intrinsic climatic predictability affects plant traits, allocation strategies and the selective regime acting on them are scarce, as well as evidence for the importance of root functional traits to cope with climatic uncertainty. Here, we experimentally manipulated...
Humans are increasingly acknowledged as apex predators that shape landscapes of fear to which herbivores adapt their behaviour. Here, we investigate how humans modify deer space‐use and their effects on vegetation at two spatial scales; zones with different types of human use (largescale risk factor) and, nested within that, trails (fine‐scale risk factor). In zones with three contrasting types of...
A fundamental question about the ecology of herbivore populations pertains to the relative influence of biotic and abiotic processes on nutritional condition. Nutritional condition is influenced in important, yet poorly understood, ways by plant secondary metabolites (PSMs) which can adversely affect a herbivore's physiology and energetics. Here we assess the relative influence of various abiotic...
Heterospecific pollen deposition (HPD) is ubiquitous across plant communities, especially for generalized species which use a diversity of pollinators, and may have negative effects on plant reproduction. However, it is unclear whether temporal changes in the co‐flowering community result in changes in HPD patterns. Moreover, community‐level studies are required to understand which factors influence...
Bryophytes are largely responsible for globally significant carbon accumulation in peatland ecosystems. This accumulation is primarily caused by the slow decomposition of these mosses, which can be attributed to a combination of intrinsic (chemical) characteristics of decaying mosses and extrinsic (environmental) influences. Here we investigated the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of...
What is the prevalent topology among interaction networks? How do consumers balance between generalism and performance when exploiting different resources? These two long‐standing, still open questions have been unified under a common framework by the integrative hypothesis of specialization (IHS). According to the IHS, ecological specialization is structured by different processes at small and large...
Recruitment and dispersal are important demographic rates and studying their determinants is particularly important in the current context of global anthropogenic perturbations. In birds, and especially for migratory species, assessing these rates is challenging because of the difficulties involved in tracking individuals beyond fledging. Here we assessed the determinants of nest box local recruitment...
Understanding the causes of the generally positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) is a major research focus in ecology. Early analyses of BEF used a modification of the evolutionary Price equation to partition effects of biodiversity into components of complementarity (species richness) and dominance (species composition). However, early experiments and data on BEF...
In mast‐seeding species, strong annual variation in seed production is assumed to drive seed fate and ultimately plant recruitment. However, the effects of temporal variation in seed crops on spatial patterns of seed rain and recruitment are poorly understood, in part because of limited data on fine‐scale spatial variation of seed deposition. To investigate how mast‐seeding affects spatial variation...
Fleshy fruits have evolved to be attractive to frugivorous seed dispersers. As a result, many fruit traits like size, color, scent and nutritional content are assumed to be the result of selective pressures exerted by frugivores. At the same time, fruit traits are also subjected to a set of other selective pressures and constraints. One such trait is fruit hardness. On one hand, haptic cues have been...
Seed dispersal is a critical ecological function provided largely by vertebrate frugivores in tropical forests. The seed dispersal events mediated by a frugivore species depend on the interaction between the frugivore's traits and landscape structure. Managers seeking to restore seed dispersal to degraded areas to facilitate passive regeneration must consider these interactions. We explore how the...
The diversity of tropical forests is strongly shaped by mutualistic interactions involving plants and frugivores that disperse their seeds. However, it is little known how decreases in the diversity of frugivores can affect seed dispersal patterns, plant community composition and species' coexistence in tropical forest landscapes. Here, we investigated the effects of bird frugivore diversity on seed...
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