Filtering by Subject: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Published: 2022-09-29
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Human influence is driving planetary change, often in undesirable and unsustainable ways. Recent advances enabled us to measure changes in humanity’s footprint on Earth annually from 2000 – 2019 with a nine-fold improvement in spatial resolution over previous efforts. We found that earlier studies seriously under-estimated the magnitude, extent, and rate of change in the human footprint. [...]
Published: 2022-09-29
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Since its discovery in Lake Mead in 2007, the invasive quagga mussel (Dreissena rostriformis bugensis) has rapidly spread throughout the lower Colorado River drainage. However, the invasion in California remained confined to the Colorado and water systems throughout southern California that receive water from the Colorado River until December 2013, when quagga mussels were first observed in Lake [...]
Published: 2022-09-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Genetic research is a key component to modern wildlife conservation, but it is contingent on the collection of reliable and high-quality genetic samples. Invasive genetic sampling techniques have potential to negatively impact individuals, which may be prohibitive when working with threatened and endangered species. Prior to sample collection, project managers must try to balance the negative [...]
Published: 2022-09-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Biophysical and socio-cultural factors have jointly shaped the distribution of global biodiversity, yet relatively few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of social and ecological landscapes on wildlife distributions. We sought to determine whether social and ecological covariates shape the distribution of a cultural keystone species, the bearded pig (Sus barbatus). Drawing on a [...]
Published: 2022-09-13
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The many biophysical factors that shape how plant species sort across environmental gradients may include photoinhibition, which I define broadly as oxidative damage that plants and other phototrophs risk incurring when they absorb excess light energy they cannot safely dissipate. Photoinhibition is seldom explicitly discussed as a potential driver of plant fitness and distributions. Here, I aim [...]
Published: 2022-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Novel viral pathogens are causing diseases to emerge in humans, a challenge to which society has responded with technological innovations such as antiviral therapies. Antivirals can be rapidly deployed to mitigate severe disease, and with vaccines, save human lives and provide a long-term safety net against new viral diseases. Yet with these advances come unforeseen consequences when antivirals [...]
Published: 2022-09-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Carbon and nutrient recycling by free-living microbial decomposers and fire - two key recycling pathways - are highly sensitive to climatic variation. However, mutualistic associations of microbiomes with plants and animals cause previously underestimated environmental buffering effects. This close cooperation between small and large organisms solves a fundamental allometric trade-off between [...]
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Anthropogenic climate and land use changes are the main drivers of biodiversity loss, promoting a major reorganization of the biota in all ecosystems. Biodiversity loss implies not only in the loss of species, but also entails losses in other dimensions of biodiversity, such as functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity and the diversity of ecological interactions.Yet, each of those facets of [...]
Published: 2022-07-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Comparative analyses require researchers to not only ensure data quality, but also to make prudent and justifiable assumptions about data comparability. A failure to do so can lead to unreliable conclusions. As a case in point, we comment on a study that estimated the vulnerability of the world’s fish species to climate change using comparison between life stages (Dahlke et al. 2020, Science 369: [...]
Published: 2022-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Interactions between organisms are very diverse and attend to multiple biological demands, hence understanding ecological communities requires considering different types of species interactions beyond predation. In this work, we assemble for the first time the non-trophic networks of an Antarctic ecosystem. We report mutualistic (+/+), competitive (-/-), commensalistic (+/0) and amensalistic [...]
Published: 2022-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the spatial context of animal movements is fundamental for establishment and management of protected areas (PA). However, these data are not readily available for large raptors, particularly for tropical species. We telemetry-tracked 36 captive-reared and wild-rehabilitated Harpia harpyja and estimated dispersal and space use after release in Mesoamerica. We evaluated the [...]
Published: 2022-05-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The temporal variability of ecological properties tends to decrease with spatial scale and levels of biological organization, but how does it propagate across trophic levels? We compiled metacommunity time-series datasets spanning basal resources to top predators from 355 freshwater sites across three continents. Temporal variability in abundance decreased from producers to tertiary consumers [...]
Published: 2022-05-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Mountain lions, also called cougars, pumas and Florida panthers, are a wide-ranging, large felid in the western hemisphere. Every U.S. state in which there are breeding populations of mountain lions offer the species some level of protection, except Texas. Here, we summarize historical research on mountain lions in Texas, human perceptions about the species, and historical discussions within [...]
Published: 2022-04-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Tundra soils are one of the world’s largest organic carbon stores, yet this carbon is vulnerable to accelerated decomposition as climate warming progresses. We currently know very little about landscape-scale controls of litter decomposition in tundra ecosystems, which hinders our understanding of the global carbon cycle. 2. Here, we examined how local-scale topography, surface air [...]
Published: 2022-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single-population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi-population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state-of-the-art analytical tools are typically tailored to specific datasets. We capitalized [...]