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Understanding processes that determine biodiversity is a fundamental challenge in ecology. At the landscape scale, physical alteration of ecosystems by organisms, called ecosystem engineering, enhances biodiversity worldwide by increasing heterogeneity in resource conditions and enhancing species coexistence across engineered and non‐engineered habitats. Engineering–diversity relationships can vary...
Trait variation within populations is an important area of research for empirical and theoretical ecologists. While differences between individuals are doubtlessly ubiquitous, their role for species coexistence is much less clear and highly debated. Both unstructured (random) and structured (linked to space, time or inheritance) intraspecific trait variation (ITV) may modify species interactions with...
Disturbance plays a key role in ecological structure and function. Two important and often studied components of disturbance are frequency and magnitude. Despite the potential for non‐linear interactions between frequency and magnitude, their effects are often assumed to combine in a linear manner. Additionally, studies of disturbance have mainly examined effects on species diversity and competitive...
Species abundance distributions (SADs) characterise the distribution of individuals among species. SADs have rarely been explored on islands and the ecological processes shaping SADs are still not fully understood. Notably, the relative importance of disturbance regime in shaping plant SADs remains poorly known. We investigate the relative importance of disturbance regime and island geography on the...
Catastrophic events, like oil spills and hurricanes, occur in many marine systems. One potential role of marine reserves is buffering populations against disturbances, including the potential for disturbance‐driven population collapses under Allee effects. This buffering capacity depends on reserves in a network providing rescue effects, setting up a tradeoff where reserves need to be connected to...
Individual variation in disturbance vulnerability (i.e. the likelihood that disturbance negatively affects an individual's fitness) can affect how disturbance impacts animal populations, as even at low disturbance levels some individuals could be severely affected and die. Individual variation in vulnerability can arise due to different responses to disturbance. We propose a new hypothesis that even...
Improving our understanding of stability across spatial scales is crucial in the current scenario of biodiversity loss. Still, most empirical studies of stability target small scales. We experimentally removed the local space‐dominant species (macroalgae, barnacles, or mussels) at eight sites spanning more than 1000 km of coastline in north‐ and south‐central Chile, and quantified the relationship...
In theory, canopy openings can influence tree species establishment and resulting distributions over environmental gradients, but evidence concerning the magnitude and direction of such effects remain scarce. In this study we examine how canopy openings influence seedling persistence and growth and resulting elevation range limits. We transplanted 1360 seedlings of eight woody species (trees Trichilia habanensis...
Some three‐species motifs (unique patterns of interactions between three species) are both more stable when modelled in isolation and over‐represented in empirical food webs. This suggests that these motifs may reduce extinction risk for species participating in them, ultimately stabilising the food web as a whole. We test whether a species' time to extinction following a perturbation is related to...
We developed dynamic bioenergetics models to investigate how behavioural responses to anthropogenic disturbance events might affect the population dynamics of three marine mammal species (harbour porpoise, grey seal and harbour seal) with contrasting life‐history traits (capital versus income breeders) and movement behaviour (resident versus nomadic). We used these models to analyse how individual...
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