Delayed greening, the phenomenon in which expanding leaves appear red, blue or pale green due to low chlorophyll content, has long intrigued ecologists. However, little is known about what type of species are most likely to delay greening or which environmental conditions are associated with delayed greening. We spectroscopically quantified leaf pigments in 105 species from 12 representative terrestrial

Temperature generally drives latitudinal patterns in the strength of trophic interactions, including consumption rates. However, local community and other environmental conditions might also affect consumption, disrupting latitudinal gradients, which results in complex large-scale patterns. This study assessed the relative effect of environmental variables and local consumer communities on predation

Tropical ecosystems contain the world's largest biodiversity of vascular plants. Yet, our understanding of tropical functional diversity and its contribution to global diversity patterns is constrained by data availability. This discrepancy underscores an urgent need to bridge data gaps by incorporating comprehensive tropical root data into global datasets. Here, we provide a database of tropical root

Several factors are known to affect bird migration timing, but no study has simultaneously compared the effects of temperature, land surface phenology, vegetation greenness, and relative humidity in both spring and fall. In addition, it is unclear whether long‐term shifts in migration phenologies have kept pace with changing climates. For example, if migration shifts earlier in the spring, temperatures

Life‐history variation can contribute to the long‐term persistence of populations; however, it remains unclear which environmental factors drive life‐history variation within a population. Seasonally recurring resource subsidies are common in nature and may influence variations in recipient consumers' life‐history traits. In this study, we experimentally demonstrated that terrestrial invertebrate subsidies

The Ruaha-Rungwa landscape of southern Tanzania contains one of the world’s largest populations of lions, as well as leopards, hyenas and other carnivores. Many local people also graze their livestock in the area, and predation on livestock by wildlife causes livelihood losses and conflicts that can undermine conservation efforts. Over recent years, some households have started to contain livestock

Museum specimens offer a unique and powerful tool for understanding the impact of anthropogenic change on populations over time. Morphological traits can be impacted by many different environmental variables that are difficult to separate from one another as potential driving factors. Comparative analyses among similar species jointly experiencing change in the same environmental variables can help

Freshwater environments are intertwined with human activities and the consequence has been environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Fish provide key ecological and economic benefits, and fish abundance and diversity can be affected by human activities resulting in functional diversity (FD) changes that might scale up to ecosystem impacts. Changes in FD can be expressed by quantifying its three

Global hydrological cycles are shifting due to climate change, and projected increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events will likely affect essential ecosystem processes driven by climate, such as forest decomposition. Our objective was to determine the effects of drought and intense rainfall on leaf litter and wood decomposition rates. We used a precipitation manipulation

Cities, despite being responsible for the loss of habitat as they grow, are also an important refugium for biodiversity. Many urban areas in the tropical areas of the global south are rich in biodiversity and are also undergoing climate warming and heat island impacts. Eliciting support from policy and decision makers for sustaining the habitats for birds in cities may depend on how conservation of

Ecological communities under extreme environments are shaped by a balance of environmental filtering and coexistence mechanisms that result in a series of assembly rules. Although there is abundant evidence about the importance of these community assembly mechanisms in plants, their effects have been seldom compared for animals. We assess their relative importance for the temporal and spatial responses

Anthropogenic climate change, particularly changes in temperature and precipitation, affects plants in multiple ways. Because plants respond dynamically to stress and acclimate to changes in growing conditions, diagnosing quantitative plant‐environment relationships is a major challenge. One approach to this problem is to quantify leaf responses using spectral reflectance, which provides rapid, inexpensive

The processes driving defense trait correlations may vary within and between species based on ecological or environmental contexts. However, most studies of plant defense theory fail to address this potential for shifts in trait correlations across scales. In this work, we tested for correlations between multiple defensive traits (secondary chemistry, carbon to nitrogen ratio, domatia, leaf toughness

Body size is a key functional trait that has declined in many biological communities, partly due to changes in individual growth rates in response to climate warming. However, our understanding of growth responses in natural populations is limited by relatively short time series without large temperature contrasts and unknown levels of adaptation to local temperatures across populations within species

Earthworms are key organisms in terrestrial ecosystems. They are found globally and provide significant ecological functions and ecosystem services, so their conservation should be a priority. Yet little is known about the large‐scale impacts of global change on earthworm diversity, species distribution, and assemblage structure. More importantly, there are no comprehensive data on changes over long

The global spread of invasive species in aquatic ecosystems has prompted population control efforts to mitigate negative impacts on native species and ecosystem functions. Removal programs that optimally allocate removal effort across space and time offer promise for improving invader suppression or eradication, especially given the limited resources available to these programs. However, science‐based

Ecologists investigate a vast range of questions, scales and organisms, which makes their methods correspondingly varied. Each approach has value, and we should celebrate the variety of this scientific field.

Natural ecosystems are characterized by a specialization pattern where few species are common while many others are rare. In ecological networks involving biotic interactions, specialization operates as a continuum at individual, species, and community levels. Theory predicts that ecological and evolutionary factors can primarily explain specialization. However, we still do not understand how specialization

The global biodiversity loss is causing abrupt shifts in the structure and functioning of ecosystems with severe ecological and socio‐economic consequences. Therefore, improving our understanding of ecosystem dynamics and regime shifts, as well as the stabilizing role of biodiversity across multiple scales is needed. Here we investigate the temporal dynamics and stability of marine ecosystems using

Climate change is expected to decrease habitat suitability for conifers in the mixed species, temperate forests of New England in the northeastern United States. How existing forests will be affected during the transition from current to future growing conditions, however, is less clear and has important implications for commercially managed forests and the growing interest in forest carbon as a natural

Floral resources are important food resources for pollinators. These resources are produced in different quantities depending on land cover and plant species composition, and the quantity of production varies seasonally. As such, land use change and management of natural resources can have substantial impacts on conservation through resource provision for pollinators, and also commercial enterprises

The classic restoration ecology model of ecosystem recovery predicts that restoring the initial conditions of a formerly degraded site will facilitate recovery and convergence with a reference site. Few restoration studies have long‐term longitudinal data to evaluate recovery trajectories, which typically vary among different aspects of ecosystem structure and composition. We used repeat surveys to

Ecosystem‐based fisheries management strives to account for species interactions and ecosystem processes in natural resource management and conservation. In this context, ecosystem‐wide caps on total fishery catches have been proposed as one tool to manage multispecies fisheries with an ecosystem approach. However, determining effective ecosystem caps is complicated because fish stock production is

Ornamental horticulture is the major pathway of non‐native plant species introductions worldwide. Historic nursery catalogues capture a long‐term view of introduction effort arising from garden plantings and are a powerful resource for understanding why some introduced ornamental species subsequently jump the garden fence. Analyses of historic nursery catalogues can help us understand the reasons for

Occupancy models estimate a species' occupancy probability while accounting for imperfect detection, but often overlook the issue of false‐positive detections. This problem of false positives has gained attention recently with the rapid advancement of automated species detection tools using artificial intelligence (AI), which generate continuous confidence scores for each species detection. Novel occupancy

The Arctic experiences rapid climate change, but our ability to predict how this will influence plant communities is hampered by a lack of data on the extent to which different species are associated with particular environmental conditions, how these conditions are interlinked, and how they will change in coming years. Increasing temperatures may negatively affect plants associated with cold areas

Monitoring wildlife populations through the collection of abundance and distribution data across climatic seasons and multiple years is critical to understanding wildlife spatiotemporal dynamics. This is especially important in landscapes faced with natural and anthropogenic disturbances, which include the state of Rhode Island, USA. Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the United

Most work on source‐sink dynamics in metacommunities assumes that species have minimal or no niche overlap and thus different sources and sinks. We explore the alternative possibility: competing species have an overlapping set of sources and sinks. Using both implicit‐space two‐patch (ordinary differential equations) and explicit‐space reaction–diffusion (partial differential equations) models, we

The study of assembly patterns and dynamics of organisms has long remained a foundational theme in ecology. Further, the relationship between assemblages and different habitats can provide important insight into ecological processes and guide management and conservation efforts (e.g., restoration, protected areas). We conducted underwater visual surveys of reef‐fish assemblages at 14 sites in the eastern

Pollinator declines pose a threat to ecosystems and food production. Agriculture contributes to, but also suffers from, the erosion of pollination services. Our study explores the potential of trees in agricultural landscapes to support pollinators by providing floral resources. Our overarching objective is the quantification of floral resources produced by wild cherry (Prunus avium L.) that can be