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The vulnerability of a terrestrial ectotherm to high environmental temperatures depends on the animal's thermal physiology and thermoregulatory behaviour. These variables – environment, physiology, and behaviour – interact with each other, complicating assessment of species vulnerability to global warming. We previously uncovered a counterintuitive pattern in rainforest sunskinks Lampropholis coggeri...
The combination of spatial structure and non‐linear population dynamics can promote the persistence of coupled populations, even when the average population growth rate of the patches seen in isolation would predict otherwise. This phenomenon has generally been conceptualized and investigated through the movement of individuals among patches that each holds many individuals, as in metapopulation models...
Soil pH is a key predictor of plant species occurrence owing to its effect on the availability of nutrients and phytotoxic metals. Although regional differences in realized soil pH niche (‘niche shifts’) have been reported since the 19th century, no study has disentangled how they are influenced by spatial differences in substrate availability, macroclimate, and competitors. We linked plot‐level data...
Identifying resource preference is considered essential for developing targeted conservation plans but, for many species, questions remain about the best way to estimate preference. Resource preferences for bees are particularly difficult to determine as the resources they collect, nectar and pollen, are challenging to estimate availability and collection. Resources are traditionally measured at the...
The phenology of seed ripening and release are important for dispersal, reproductive success and survival of plants. Most phenological studies, however, consider early phenological phases. Here, we examined the ecological and evolutionary basis of ripening and seed release phenology. We monitored single flower phenology for 104 plant species from 30 families and three life forms from central Europe...
Can competitive interactions be inferred from the analysis of community functional diversity patterns? Originally, at the scale of a community, competitive interactions were supposed to generate trait overdispersion patterns due to limiting similarity process. More recently, by highlighting the importance of competitive hierarchies, it has been shown that when only one resource limits species coexistence,...
To understand controls over biodiversity, it is necessary to take a multi‐scale approach to understand how local and regional factors affect the community assembly processes that drive emergent patterns. This need is reflected in the growing use of the metacommunity concept to interpret multi‐scale measures of biodiversity, including metrics derived from diversity partitioning (e.g. α, β and γ diversity)...
While environmental factors strongly influence plant growth and reproduction, less is known about environmental effects on sexual selection and sexual conflict. In this study on mixed‐mating Collinsia heterophylla we investigated whether soil resource environment affected traits associated with sexual conflict. In C. heterophylla a sexual conflict over timing of stigma receptivity occurs. Early stigma...
Recent observational studies form oligotrophic waters provide ample evidence that mixotrophic flagellates often account for the bulk of bacterivory. However, we lack a general framework that allows a mechanistic understanding of success of mixotrophs in the competition with heterotrophic bacterivores. This is especially needed for integrating mixotrophy in models of the microbial loop. Based on general...
Ecologists are increasingly aware of the interplay between evolutionary history and ecological processes in shaping current species interaction patterns. The inclusion of phylogenetic relationships in studies of species interaction networks has shown that closely related species commonly interact with sets of similar species. Notably, the degree of phylogenetic conservatism in antagonistic ecological...
The traditional debate on alternative community states has been over whether or not they exist. Studies of community assembly have examined the role of assembly history in driving community divergence, but the context in which assembly history becomes important is a continued topic of interest. In this study, we created communities of bacterivorous ciliated protists in laboratory microcosms and manipulated...
Predator avoidance depends on prey being able to discern how risk varies in space and time, but this is made considerably more complicated if risk is simultaneously present from multiple predators. This is the situation for an increasing number of mammalian prey species, as large carnivores recover or are reintroduced in ecosystems on several continents. Roe deer Capreolus capreolus in southern Norway...
Migratory prey is a widespread phenomenon that has implications for predator–prey interactions. By creating large temporal variation in resource availability between seasons it becomes challenging for carnivores to secure a regular year‐round supply of food. Some predators may respond by following their migratory prey, however, most predators are sedentary and experience strong seasonal variation...
How species diversity influences ecosystem functioning has been the subject of many experiments and remains a key question for ecology and conservation biology. However, the fact that diversity cannot be manipulated without affecting species composition makes this quest methodologically challenging. Here, we evaluate the relative importance of diversity and of composition on biomass production, by...
Community genetics aims at understanding how within‐species variation, species diversity and environmental factors interact to shape community assembly. An approach that emerged a few years ago has been to quantify the correlation between the neutral genetic diversity of a focal species and species diversity of the surrounding community (species–genetic diversity correlations, or SGDCs). We here review...
Above–belowground (AG–BG) studies typically focus on plant‐mediated effects inflicted by living organisms. However, animal cadavers may also play an important role in AG–BG interactions. Here, we explore whether living and dead foliar‐feeding and soil‐dwelling invertebrates differentially affect plants and their associated AG and BG multitrophic communities.
In a mesocosm study we separated effects...
In some ecosystems a small suite of species can determine community‐level patterns of species richness by acting as either ‘accumulators’ or ‘repellers’; that is, the richness of the immediate neighbourhood of such species departs from that expected on the basis of a given null model. Using the individual species‐area approach, we evaluated community‐level spatial pattern in four species‐rich shrublands...
Dormant life stages are often critical for population viability in stochastic environments, but accurate field data characterizing them are difficult to collect. Such limitations may translate into uncertainties in demographic parameters describing these stages, which then may propagate errors in the examination of population‐level responses to environmental variation. Expanding on current methods,...
Microbial symbionts of plants can affect decomposition by altering the quality or quantity of host plant tissue (substrate) or the micro‐environment where decomposition occurs (conditioning). In C3 grasses, foliar fungal endophytes (Clavicipitaceae) can increase plant resistance to drought and/or produce alkaloids that reduce herbivory – effects that may also influence host litter composition and...
The biodiversity of a habitat patch is predicted to be driven in part by interactions between patch quality and landscape context (i.e. type of regional matrix), but these interactions are rarely explored experimentally. Understanding the interaction between patch quality and matrix context can provide insight into the kind of dynamics that best describe a metacommunity and help predict how the diversity...
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