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One of the best known ecological consequences of climate change is the advancement of spring phenology. Yet, we lack insights into how changes in climate interact with intraspecific genetic variation in shaping spring and autumn phenology, and how such changes in phenology will translate into seasonal dynamics of tree‐associated organisms. To elucidate the impact of warming and tree genotype on spring...
The nature and the strength of plant–frugivore interactions often vary along an antagonism–mutualism continuum and are highly influenced by the local ecological context (e.g. level of environmental disturbances). However, little is known concerning how the local ecological setting where plant–frugivore interactions take place affects the seed dispersal effectiveness (SDE) and, eventually, plant recruitment...
Environmental disturbances affect ecosystem functioning through changes in organisms’ metabolism (direct effect) and biodiversity loss (indirect or biodiversity‐mediated effect). It is still a challenge to separate direct and biodiversity‐mediated effects of environmental changes on ecosystem functioning due to the difficulties in isolating ‘true’ biodiversity loss effects. Furthermore, it is still...
Biogenic structures that persist post‐mortem are ubiquitous, but rarely considered as key ecological features. Post‐mortem structures in many ecological systems exert community‐level effects and thus the dynamics of their degradation (i.e. taphonomy) become important in affecting community functions and ecosystem services, and these often‐overlooked effects may rival the influence of recruitment and...
Quantifying the distribution and size of home ranges is critical for understanding animal spatial dynamics. This is particularly important for large carnivores in fragmented landscapes. Most studies that estimate home range consider only a bivariate frequency distribution represented by a two‐dimensional planimetric surface. The underlying assumption of these approaches is that the animals inhabit...
Ontogenetic variation is the most fundamental biological aspect of an organism, and stage‐structured (size‐structured) prey–predator relationships have increasingly been studied for better understanding food webs. However, little is known about stage‐structured mutualism and its community consequences (i.e. when and where it occurs and how it matters in community ecology). This article aims to argue...
The metacommunity, as it evolved from Levins's metapopulation, provides a framework to consider the spatial organization of species interactions. A defining feature of metapopulations and metacommunities is that organisms (populations or communities) are connected via migration. An important result from Levins's metapopulation work – that increasing migration lowers regional extinction probability...
Seed predators sometimes inflict non‐lethal seed damage. We asked whether seed size modulates the location of insect seed damage and examined whether location‐specific damage on the embryo influences early plant development (embryo survival, germination, seedling emergence and performance). We used intact and weevil‐infested seeds of a prevalent California oak tree Quercus agrifolia as study model...
Habitat‐forming ecosystem engineers are the foundation of many marine ecosystems where they support diverse and productive food‐webs. A reduction in their patch size or density may affect the productivity, biodiversity and stability of these ecosystems. We determined the effects of different densities and patch sizes of Ecklonia radiata (the dominant kelp in southern Australia) on the secondary productivity,...
J. B. S. Haldane is widely quoted to have quipped that the Creator, if one exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles. Although Coleoptera may not be the most speciose order once Hymenopteran diversity is fully accounted for, as a whole the very clear differences in species diversity among taxa require an explanation. Here we use stochastic simulations to show that dispersal has eco‐evolutionary...
Cross‐ecosystem subsidies are studied with a focus on resource exchange at local ecosystem boundaries. This perspective ignores regional dynamics that can emerge via constraints imposed by the landscape, potentially leading to spatially‐dependent effects of subsidies and spatial feedbacks. Using miniaturized landscape analogues of river dendritic and terrestrial lattice spatial networks, we manipulated...
Energetic balance is central to the survival and persistence of free‐ranging animals. Quantifying expenditures and identifying factors that drive energetics informs our understanding of species' ecology and their responses to shifting environmental conditions. Approaches used to estimate energetic expenditures of free‐ranging species, such as doubly‐labelled water (DLW), are precise but difficult...
The functioning of plant communities is strongly influenced by the number of species in the community and their spatial arrangement. This is because plants interact with their nearest neighbors and this interaction is expected to be stronger when the interacting individuals are ecologically similar in terms of resource use. Recent evidence shows that species richness alters the balance of intra‐ versus...
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