Most plant species exhibit spatially clustered distributions. Theory suggests such conspecific aggregation can delay competitive exclusion by sparing weak competitors. However, the extent to which spatial aggregation increases species performance and which species are likely to benefit from it remain largely unknown. In this study, we asked (1) whether spatial aggregation enhances plant performance

Seminal hypotheses in ecology and evolution postulate that stronger and more specialized biotic interactions contribute to higher species diversity at lower elevations and latitudes. Plant‐chemical defenses mediate biotic interactions between plants and their natural enemies and provide a highly dimensional trait space in which chemically mediated niches may facilitate plant species coexistence. However

Acid rain, with 60% deposition in Asia, may exacerbate plant phosphorus (P) limitation; however, its long‐term effects on different plant life‐forms remain largely undetermined. Understanding these effects is essential for predicting ecosystem resilience and promoting forest health under environmental change. Herein, we investigated the P status in two tree and two herb species and their rhizosphere

Year‐to‐year variation in seed crop size (i.e., masting) varies strongly among populations of the same species. Understanding what causes this variation is vital, as masting affects the ability of tree species to regenerate and determines the population dynamics of a wide variety of animals. It is commonly thought that environmental stress is a key driver of masting variability. The environmental stress

Spatial confinement to a home range is theorized to be a more energetically efficient method of acquiring resources than random searching due to spatial memory. Intraspecific studies that have compared home range size at different population densities have found that home ranges shrink as population density increases. This negative trend could be due to increased conspecific competition via population

Soil microorganisms play outsized roles in nutrient cycling, plant health, and climate regulation. Despite their importance, we have a limited understanding of how soil microbes are affected by habitat fragmentation, including their responses to conditions at fragment edges, or “edge effects.” To understand the responses of soil communities to edge effects, we analyzed the distributions of soil bacteria

This study provides a pioneering analysis of the structural and topological characteristics of one of nature's simplest food webs, using the Montaña Clara islet (Canary Islands) as a case study. Applying a multilayer network approach, which assesses multiple interaction types, we examined plant–animal and plant‐fungi interactions during two seasons (humid and dry), comparing this oceanic island food

COVER PHOTO: The cover image, photographed in February 2020, depicts flamingos and palm trees along the lakeshore of Lake Balangida, a shallow alkaline lake in Singida, Tanzania. The lake, characterized by a pH of 9.93 and salinity of 85,318 ppm, provides a unique habitat for extremophile microorganisms. Ren et al. (Ecology, Volume 106, Issue 3, Article e70047; doi:10.1002/ecy.70047) investigate traits

Global nitrogen (N) enrichment is modifying microbial interactions, which can be represented by network complexity. While a number of studies have explored how N addition influences the microbial intra‐trophic network, its effects on the inter‐trophic network have rarely been investigated. Here, we examined the effects of 8 years of multilevel N additions (i.e., 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 g N m−2

Rising temperatures negatively affect bumble bee fitness directly through physiological impacts and indirectly by disrupting mutualistic interactions between bees and other organisms, which are crucial in determining species‐specific responses to climate change. Gut microbial symbionts, key regulators of host nutrition and health, may be the Achilles' heel of thermal responses in insects. They not

Biogeochemical fluxes through ecological communities underpin the functioning of ecosystems worldwide. These fluxes are often heavily influenced by small‐bodied consumers, such as insects, worms, mollusks, or small vertebrates, which transfer energy and nutrients from autotrophic sources to larger animals. Although coral reefs are one of the most productive ecosystems in the world, we know relatively

Ecologists have documented many characteristics of natural systems that foster ecosystem persistence, and it might be deduced that such strategies are essential for counteracting the negative effect of complexity on local stability that was suggested by R.M. May in his influential work of the 1970s. However, we show that the loss of local stability does not necessarily imply total ecosystem extinction

Greater tree diversity often increases forest productivity by increasing the fraction of light captured and the effectiveness of light use at the community scale. However, light may shape forest function not only as a source of energy or a cause of stress but also as a context cue: Plant photoreceptors can detect specific wavelengths of light, and plants use this information to assess their neighborhoods

Functional traits and their variations are essential indicators of plant metabolism, growth, distribution, and survival and determine how a plant and an ecosystem function. Under the same climatic condition, traits can vary significantly between species and within the same species growing in different topographic conditions. When drought stress occurs, plants growing in these conditions may respond

Body size is a key trait in ecology due to its influence on metabolism and many other life‐history traits that affect population and community responses to environmental variation as well as ecosystem properties. The size spectrum represents the relationship between abundance (or biomass) and body size, independent of species identity. Size spectrum parameters, such as the slope or intercept, have

The stability of forest productivity is a widely studied phenomenon often associated with tree species diversity. Yet, drivers of stability in forest structure and its consequences for forest productivity remain poorly understood. Using a large (10 ha) young tree diversity experiment, we evaluated how forest structure and multiple dimensions of diversity and composition are related to remotely sensed

Plants respond to their environment with both short‐term, within‐generation trait plasticity, and long‐term, between‐generation evolutionary changes. However, the relative magnitude of plant responses to short‐ and long‐term changes in the environment remains poorly understood. Shifts in phenological traits can serve as harbingers for responses to environmental change, and both a plant's current and

COVER PHOTO: A broadclub cuttlefish (Sepia latimanus) passes dark stripes downward over its head while approaching prey in the waters off Kri Island (Raja Ampat, Indonesia). By observing this species in the wild using self‐contained breathing apparatus (scuba), How et al. (Ecology, Volume 106, Issue 3, Article e70021; doi:10.1002/ecy.70021) show that broadclub cuttlefish hunt prey using four very different

Understanding the mechanisms driving community structure and dynamics is crucial in the face of escalating climate change, including increasing incidences of extreme weather. Cell size is a master trait of small organisms that is subject to a trade‐off between resistance to grazing and competition for resources, and thus holds potential to explain and predict community dynamics in response to disturbances

Flowering and fruiting phenology can have large impacts on a plant's reproductive success. In many plant species, these phenological events are controlled by seasonal climatic cues, resulting in one‐year reproductive cycles. However, parts of SE Asian tropical forests have an aseasonal climate with irregular fluctuations. This database comprises phenology records collected from 1993 to 2011 at the

Many disease epidemics recur seasonally, and such seasonal epidemics can be shaped by species interactions among parasites, pathogens, or other microbes. Field experiments are a classic approach for understanding species interactions but are rarely used to study seasonal epidemics. Our research objective was to help fill this gap by manipulating the seasonal timing of the establishment of infectious

Microbial trait variation along environmental gradients is crucial to understanding their ecological adaptation mechanisms. With the increasing availability of microbial genomes, making full use of the genome‐based traits to decipher their adaptation strategies becomes promising and urgent. Here, we examined microbial communities in water and sediments of 20 East African lakes with pH values ranging

The above article, published online on 01 November 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement among the first author, Raphaël Royauté; the journal Editor‐in‐Chief, Kathryn L. Cottingham; Ecological Society of America; and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The retraction has been agreed due to data fabrication and duplication. The author contributions were as follows:

Populations must continuously respond to environmental change or risk extinction. These responses can be measured as phenotypic rates of change, which allow researchers to predict their contemporary evolutionary responses. In 1999, a database of phenotypic rates of change in wild populations was compiled. Since then, researchers have used (and expanded) this database to examine the phenotypic responses

Low population densities at the expanding edge of a biological invasion are predicted to reduce intraspecific competition such that invading organisms evolve to prioritize adaptations for rapid rates of population growth and dispersal over those that facilitate success in competitive interactions. The larvae (tadpoles) of anuran species that breed in isolated waterbodies provide excellent models with

Nutrients and light are major resources controlling growth, biomass, and community structure of phytoplankton. When looking at those resources individually, resource uptake and biochemical transformation, and thereby also the demand for resources, have been shown to be temperature‐dependent. However, there is still a lack of understanding of how temperature controls the response to multiple resources

Structure‐forming foundation species facilitate consumers by providing habitat and refugia. In return, consumers can benefit foundation species by reducing top‐down pressures and increasing the supply of nutrients. Consumer‐mediated nutrient dynamics (CND) fuel the growth of autotrophic foundation species and generate more habitat for consumers, forming reciprocal feedbacks. Such feedbacks are threatened

Tropical forests are disappearing, but we have a limited understanding of the factors driving species coexistence in mammal communities of old‐growth forest ecosystems. The total energy that is bound by plants is assumed to be a key factor determining mammalian species richness, but accurately measuring energy flows in complex ecosystems is difficult, and most studies therefore rely on remote‐sensing‐based

Plant–soil feedbacks (PSFs) may determine plant–species coexistence. They may stabilize coexistence, but frequently destabilize it by increasing fitness differences between species. Most studies focus on pairwise models in greenhouses. Thus, whether PSFs favor or deter coexistence is still unclear, especially in multispecies field contexts. We analyzed pairwise and multispecies coexistence over a hydric

While temperature is well known to affect many life history traits of ectothermic organisms, any attempt to scale up these individual‐level processes to population‐level consequences must assume a relationship between temperature and the strength of per capita density dependence. Yet, theory has made contrasting predictions about this relationship, and we still need clear experimental tests to determine

A common approach to investigating species' niches is to examine relationships between spatial variation in environmental conditions and contemporary species occurrences, using species distribution models (SDM or niche models). The relationships between past species distributions and environmental variation over time are less commonly explored. One way to examine effects on species changes over time

Mutualistic interactions are biological markets in which different species exchange commodities to mutual benefit. Mutualisms are, however, susceptible to exploitation, with some individuals taking without reciprocating. While it is generally assumed that exploiters will inflict fitness costs, evidence for such costs is mixed and difficult to generalize due to their context‐dependent nature. Animal‐pollinated

A central question in biodiversity conservation is whether species will maintain viable populations under climate warming. Assessing species viability under climate warming requires demographic studies integrating vital rate responses to long‐term warming throughout species' life cycles. However, studies of this nature are rare. Our integral projection models (IPMs), parameterized with demographic

Plant–arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) mutualisms are crucial to ecosystem biodiversity and productivity. Yet, our understanding of the functional roles of plants as AMF generalists or specialists, and the consequences of these plant interaction traits for soil ecosystems are virtually unknown. We grew eight pasture plant species under two experimental conditions, sequencing their root AMF communities

Dispersal unit characteristics provide crucial insights into species ecology and are essential for the conservation and restoration of ecosystems. The Caatinga, the largest ecosystem of seasonally dry tropical forests and woodlands in South America, remains underrepresented in terms of dispersal unit data, which are often scattered across the scientific literature or remain unpublished. To address

In situ observed data are commonly used as species occurrence response variables in species distribution models. However, the use of remotely observed data from high‐resolution multispectral remote‐sensing images as a source of presence/absence data for species distribution models remains under‐developed. Here, we describe an ensemble species distribution model of black microbial mats (Nostoc spp.)

Understanding the determinants of urban forest diversity and structure is important for preserving biodiversity and sustaining ecosystem services in cities. However, comprehensive field assessments are resource‐intensive, and landscape‐level approaches may overlook heterogeneity within urban regions. To address this challenge, we combined remote sensing with field inventories to comprehensively map

Detritus‐based resources, that is, plant litter, are a major energy source for many living organisms and are considered to be a key determinant of primary production and nutrient cycling. Earthworms are among the most important macro‐detritivores in terrestrial food webs and play a crucial role in facilitating these processes in terrestrial ecosystems. Yet, the influence of litter quality on earthworm

All interactions between multiple species invading together (coinvasion) must be accounted for to predict species coexistence patterns across space. Mutualisms, particularly, are known to influence species' population dynamics and their invasive ability (e.g., mycorrhizal fungi with partner plants). Yet, while modeling coinvasion, their role in mediating coexistence is overlooked. Here, we build a

Coextinctions may exacerbate the current biodiversity crisis. Yet, we do not understand all the factors that shape the robustness of communities to the loss of species. Here we analyze how coevolution influences the robustness to secondary extinctions of mutualistic and exploitative communities. We find that coevolution increases robustness in mutualism but reduces it under exploitative interactions

Frugivory plays a crucial role in shaping Neotropical ecosystems, influencing plant dispersal, community dynamics, and ecosystem function. Despite its ecological significance, a systematic understanding of frugivore‐fruit interactions spanning the entire Neotropical realm has been lacking. Therefore, we compiled the NeoFrugivory database, which addresses this gap by synthesizing data from a wide range

The increase in phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) inputs, as well as soil acidification resulting from multiple environmental changes, has profound effects on the attributes of plant and soil biota communities, and on ecosystem functions. However, how these community attributes impact ecosystem multifunctionality (EMF) and its stability under multiple environmental changes remains unclear. By integrating

Spatial capture–recapture models (SCRs) provide an integrative statistical tool for analyzing animal movement and population patterns. Although incorporating home range formation with a theoretical basis of animal movement into SCRs can improve the prediction of animal space use in a heterogeneous landscape, this approach is challenging owing to the sparseness of recapture events. In this study, we

Clonal demographic traits play important roles in regulating community dynamics. Yet, it remains unclear how the responses of these clonal traits to drought might depend on previous drought exposure, and how drought responses vary among grasslands. We conducted a repeated drought experiment across four grasslands along an aridity gradient in northern China. We assessed the effects of single (precipitation

Conservation of marine biodiversity requires an understanding of the habitats needed to support and replenish species of interest. It also requires knowledge about the abundance and diversity of multispecies assemblages. Variation in the distribution and composition of kelp forests, one of the most productive marine coastal habitats globally, can have major influences on reef fishes—a group of ecologically

Material fluxes between ecosystems subsidize consumers in recipient ecosystems. While alpine zones are generally regarded as isolated, arthropods from lower elevations may be deposited on the snow surface in alpine zones by flight or wind. This arthropod fallout should be essential food resources for alpine consumers that are forced to deal with scarce food in environments. In this study, the source

Although important for understanding how ecosystems will fare with increasing global change, the relationship between diversity and stability in multitrophic communities is still debated. Our best understanding comes from work within competitive guilds, where the relationship between stability and functional diversity is generally positive and also more direct and mechanistic than the relationship

Environmental change drivers (ECDs) impact ecological communities in various ways, from enrichment that increases species' performance and abundance, to stressors that reduce their reproduction and growth. These effects can affect species coexistence as well as impact ecosystem functioning and the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF). Predicting the impact of ECDs on communities