Variable retention (VR) has been adopted globally as an alternative to more intensive forms of regeneration harvest. By retaining live trees within harvest units, VR seeks balance among the commodity, ecological, and aesthetic values of managed forests. Achieving these multiple, often competing objectives requires an understanding of how level and spatial pattern of retention shape the abundance, growth

Spatial aspects of connectivity have received considerable attention from ecologists and conservationists, yet temporal connectivity, the periodic linking of habitats, plays an equally important, but largely overlooked role. Different biological and biophysical attributes of ecosystems underpin temporal connectivity, but here we focus on resource continuity, the uninterrupted availability of foraging

Disturbances play a key role in driving forest ecosystem dynamics, but how disturbances shape wildlife habitat across space and time often remains unclear. A major reason for this is a lack of information about changes in habitat suitability across large areas and longer time periods. Here, we use a novel approach based on Landsat satellite image time series to map seasonal habitat suitability annually

Large carnivores are experiencing range contraction and population declines globally. Prey depletion due to illegal offtake is considered a major contributor, but the effects of prey depletion on large carnivore demography are rarely tested. We measured African lion density and tested the factors that affect survival using mark‐recapture models fit to six years of data from known individuals in Kafue

A fundamental goal of community ecology is to understand species‐habitat relationships and how they shape metacommunity structure. Recent advances in occupancy modeling enable habitat relationships to be assessed for both common and rare species within metacommunities using multi‐species occupancy models (MSOM). These models account for imperfect species detection and offer considerable advantages

In temperate forests, elevated frequency of drought related disturbances will likely increase the incidence of interactions between disturbances such as bark beetle epidemics and wildfires. Our understanding of the influence of recent drought and insect‐induced tree mortality on wildfire severity has largely lacked information from forests adapted to frequent fire. A recent unprecedented tree mortality

Soil organic carbon (SOC) regulates terrestrial ecosystem functioning, provides diverse energy sources for soil microorganisms, governs soil structure, and regulates the availability of organically‐bound nutrients. Investigators in increasingly diverse disciplines recognize how quantifying SOC attributes can provide insight about ecological states and processes. Today, multiple research networks collect

The evolution of form and function of trees of diverse species has taken place over hundreds of millions of years, while urban environments are relatively new on an evolutionary time scale, representing a novel set of environmental constraints for trees to respond to. It is important to understand how trees of different species, planted in these anthropogenically‐structured urban ecosystems, are responding

Diversified farming systems, for example those that incorporate agroforestry elements, have been proposed as a solution that could maintain and improve multiple ecosystem services. However, habitat diversification in and around arable fields has complex and inconsistent effects on invertebrate crop pests and their natural enemies. This hinders the development of policy recommendations to promote the

For ungulates and other long‐lived species, life‐history theory predicts that nutritional reserves are allocated to reproduction in a state‐dependent manner because survival is highly conserved. Further, as per‐capita food abundance and nutritional reserves decline (i.e., density‐dependence intensifies), reproduction and recruitment become increasingly sensitive to weather. Thus, the degree to which

Western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera LeConte (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), is a major pest of maize in the United States and is an invasive pest in Europe. Maize is the only agricultural crop on which western corn rootworm larvae can survive and this insect requires two consecutive years of maize cultivation to complete its lifecycle. Transgenic maize producing insecticidal proteins

Unique combinations of geographic and environmental conditions make quantifying the importance of factors that influence forest productivity difficult. I aimed to model the height growth of dominant Nothofagus alpina trees in temperate forests of Chile, as a proxy for forest productivity, by building a dynamic model that accounts for topography, habitat type, and climate conditions. Using stem analysis

Climate warming is driving an advance of leaf unfolding date in temperate deciduous forests, promoting longer growing seasons and higher carbon gains. However, an earlier leaf phenology also increases the risk of late frost defoliation (LFD) events. Compiling the spatio‐temporal patterns of defoliations caused by spring frost events is critical to unveil whether the balance between the current advance

Cultivar mixtures have been studied for decades as a means for pest suppression. The literature, however, shows a large variability in outcomes, suggesting that we are unable to create mixtures that consistently suppress insect pests and attract natural enemies. A key gap in our understanding of how cultivar mixtures influence pest control is that few studies have examined the plant traits or mechanisms

Alternative methods for restoring tropical forests influence the ecological processes that shape recruitment of understorey species. In turn, the traits of species recruited will influence the ecological processes the forests provide now and over the long‐term. We assess the phylogenetic and functional structure of seedlings beneath monoculture plantations, mixed‐species plantations (both active restoration)

Accurate assessment of larval community composition in spawning areas is essential for fisheries management and conservation but is often hampered by the cryptic nature of many larvae, which renders them difficult to identify morphologically. Metabarcoding is a rapid and cost‐effective method to monitor early life‐stages for management and environmental impact assessment purposes but its quantitative

Community occupancy models estimate species‐specific parameters while sharing information across species by treating parameters as sampled from a common distribution. When communities consist of discrete groups, shrinkage of estimates toward the community mean can mask differences among groups. Infinite‐mixture models using a Dirichlet process (DP) distribution, in which the number of latent groups

Intraspecific plant diversity can significantly impact insect herbivore populations in natural systems. Yet, its role as an insect pest control strategy in agriculture has received less attention, and little is known about which crop traits are important to herbivores in different landscape contexts. Moreover, empirical economic analyses on the cost‐effectiveness of varietal mixtures are lacking. We

Legumes are used in crop rotations by both large‐scale and smallholder farmers alike to increase soil fertility, especially before high‐nitrogen‐demanding crops such as corn (maize). Legume crop residues and green manures are rich in nitrogen due to mutualistic rhizobia, bacteria that live in their roots and convert atmospheric nitrogen into a biologically available form. Growers can obtain recommendations

Biodiversity patterns are shaped by the combination of dispersal, environment, and stochasticity, but how the influence of these drivers changes in fragmented habitats remains poorly understood. We examined patterns and relationships among total (γ) and site‐level (α) diversity, and site‐to‐site variation in composition (β‐diversity) of tree communities in structurally contiguous and fragmented tropical

Forest wildfires consume and redistribute carbon within forest carbon pools. Because the incidence of wildfires is unpredictable, quantifying wildfire effects is challenging due to the lack of pre‐fire data or controls from experiments over a large landscape. We explored a quasi‐experimental method, propensity score matching, to estimate wildfire effects on aboveground forest woody carbon mass in Washington

Urbanization is a key contributor to biodiversity loss, but evidence is mounting that cities can support rich arthropod communities, including rare and threatened species. Furthermore, greenspace is growing within hundreds of “shrinking cities” that have lost population resulting in a need to demolish an overabundance of infrastructure creating vacant land. Efforts are underway to transform vacant

Understanding how biodiversity responds to urbanization is challenging, due in part to the single‐city focus of most urban ecological research. Here, we delineate continent‐scale patterns in urban species assemblages by leveraging data from a multi‐city camera trap survey and quantify how differences in greenspace availability and average housing density among 10 North American cities relate to the

Exploration practices for oil sands developments in the boreal forest of western Canada create a network of thousands of kilometers of linear features, particularly seismic lines that dissect these forests posing significant environmental challenges. As wildfire is one of the prevalent stand‐replacing natural disturbances in the Canadian boreal forest, it is an important driver of environmental change

Managing the world’s freshwater supply to meet societal and environmental needs in a changing climate is one of the biggest challenges for the 21st century. Dams provide water security, however, the allocation of dwindling water supply among reservoirs could exacerbate or ameliorate the effects of climate change on aquatic communities. Here, we show that the relative sensitivity of river thermal regimes

Large, severe fires are becoming more frequent in many forest types across the western United States and have resulted in tree mortality across tens of thousands of hectares. Conifer regeneration in these areas is limited because seeds must travel long distances to reach the interior of large burned patches and establishment is jeopardized by increasingly hot and dry conditions. To better inform postfire

The authority to manage natural capital often follows political boundaries rather than ecological. This mismatch can lead to unsustainable outcomes, as spillovers from one management area to the next may create adverse incentives for local decision making, even within a single country. At the same time, one‐size‐fits‐all approaches of federal (centralized) authority can fail to respond to state (decentralized)

Biological soil crusts (hereafter, biocrusts) are a critical component of many semiarid ecosystems because they seriously affect seed germination, soil stability, fertility, and hydrology (Belnap 2003). These factors are central to ecosystem recovery following soil‐plant disturbances such as increased wildfire or livestock grazing. Livestock grazing is the primary land use of semiarid landscapes globally

Increasing the quantity and quality of plant biomass production in space and time can improve the capacity of agroecosystems to capture and store atmospheric carbon (C) in the soil. Cover cropping is a key practice to increase system net primary productivity (NPP) and increase the quantity of high‐quality plant residues available for integration into soil organic matter (SOM). Cover crop management

A global COVID‐19 pandemic, rising asthma and allergies ‐ along with climate change impacting storm intensity and frequency ‐ point to an urgent need to unify U.S. atmospheric biology research. To this end, we briefly define atmospheric biology, summarize its fragmented history and then outline how to unify the field to provide benefits for the U.S. science community and its citizens. Atmospheric biology

Warming‐induced mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae; MPB) outbreaks have caused extensive mortality of whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis; WBP) throughout the species’ range. In the highest mountains where WBP occur, they cross alpine treeline ecotones (ATEs) where growth forms transition from trees to shrub‐like krummholz – some of which survived recent MPB outbreaks. This observation motivated

Natural resources such as waterbodies, public parks, and wildlife refuges attract people from varying distances on the landscape, creating “social‐ecological catchments”. Catchments have provided great utility for understanding physical and social relationships within specific disciplines. Yet, catchments are rarely used across disciplines, such as its application to understand complex spatiotemporal

Monitoring marine resource exploitation is a key activity in fisheries science and biodiversity conservation. Since research surveys are time‐consuming and costly, fishery‐dependent data (i.e. derived directly from fishing vessels) are increasingly credited with a key role in expanding the reach of ocean monitoring. Fishing vessels may be seen as widely ranging data‐collecting platforms, which could

In a recent paper, Jach‐Smith and Jackson (2020) used the 15N natural abundance (δ15N) of two sources of nitrogen (N), available soil N and N in AMF, and 15N mass balance equations to calculate the amount of N transferred by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.), a perennial grass (the host plant) used in a bioenergy system in the United States. The study was conducted

A primary goal of restoration ecology is to understand the factors that generate variability in species diversity and composition among restorations. Plant communities may assemble deterministically toward a common community type, or they may assemble stochastically, ending differently because of weather conditions during establishment, soil legacy effects, or exotic species propagule pressure. To

Pest species control operations are most effective if every individual in a population is targeted. Yet, individual personality drives variation in animal responses to devices such as traps and baits. Failing to account for differences in behavior during control operations may drive a selective removal, resulting in residual animals with biased expressions of personality. If these biased traits are

It is generally assumed that restoring biodiversity will enhance diversity and ecosystem functioning. However, to date, it has rarely been evaluated whether and how restoration efforts manage to rebuild biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions (ecosystem multifunctionality) simultaneously. Here, we quantified how three restoration methods of increasing intervention intensity (harvest only < topsoil

Environmental injustice can be expressed through lack of access to resources, unequal exposure to toxins, and limited access to knowledge about the unsustainable environmental practices that impact communities (Bullard 2018). The ecological processes that contribute to the “perfect storm” of conditions that create environmental injustices are well documented in applied ecology scholarship; yet the

About 70% of the world's main crops depend on insect pollination. Climate change is already affecting the abundance and distribution of insects, which could cause geographical mismatches between crops and their pollinators. Crops that rely primarily on wild pollinators (e.g., crops that cannot be effectively pollinated by commercial colonies of honey bees) could be particularly in jeopardy. However

Woodland birds are a species assemblage of conservation concern, and their persistence in fragmented agricultural landscapes is dependent on both the preservation of existing woodland remnants and the implementation of restoration plantings. However, little is known about the habitat‐use and persistence of birds in fragmented agricultural landscapes. We present a detailed, population‐oriented study

Occupancy methods propelled the quantitative study of species distributions forward by separating the observation process, or the imperfect detectability of species, from the ecological processes of interest governing species distributions. Occupancy studies come at a cost, however: the collection of additional data to account for nondetections at sites where the species is present. The most common

Large, long‐lived species with slow life histories and protracted pre‐breeding stages are particularly susceptible to declines and extinction, often for unknown causes. Here, we show how demographic modelling of a medium‐sized raptor, the Red kite Milvus milvus, can aid to re‐focus conservation research and attention on the most likely mechanisms driving its decline. Red kites’ survival and reproduction

We surveyed ecologists and evolutionary biologists in American Universities to understand how they are coping with the COVID‐19 pandemic. Female respondents, assistant professors, and those who care for at least one child or teenager, were significantly more dissatisfied with their work‐life balance during this pandemic than others, and further expected these negative impacts to be long‐lived. Online

Postfire shifts in vegetation composition will have broad ecological impacts. However, information characterizing postfire recovery patterns and their drivers are lacking over large spatial extents. In this analysis, we used Landsat imagery collected when snow cover (SCS) was present, in combination with growing season (GS) imagery, to distinguish evergreen vegetation from deciduous vegetation. We

Increasing aridity is a challenge for forest managers and reducing stand density to minimize competition is a recognized strategy to mitigate drought impacts on growth. In many dry forests, the most widespread and common forest management programs currently being implemented focus on restoration of historical stand structures, primarily to minimize fire risk and enhance watershed function. The implications

Gridded historical climate products (GHCPs) are employed with increasing frequency when modeling ecological phenomena across large scales and predicting ecological responses to projected climate changes. Concurrently, there is an increasing acknowledgement of the need to account for uncertainty when employing climate projections from ensembles of global circulation models (GCMs) and emissions scenarios

Many important ecological phenomena occur on large spatial scales and/or are unplanned and thus do not easily fit within analytical frameworks which rely on randomization, replication, and interspersed a priori controls for statistical comparison. Analyses of such large‐sc, natural experiments are common in the health and econometrics literature, where techniques have been developed to derive insight

Coral bleaching is the single largest global threat to coral reefs worldwide. Integrating the diverse body of work on coral bleaching is critical to understanding and combating this global problem. Yet investigating the drivers, patterns, and processes of coral bleaching poses a major challenge. A recent review of published experiments revealed a wide range of experimental variables used across studies

Emerging diseases of wildlife origin are increasingly spilling over into humans and domestic animals. Surveillance and risk assessments for transmission between these populations are informed by a mechanistic understanding of the pathogens in wildlife reservoirs. For avian influenza viruses (AIV), much observational and experimental work in wildlife has been conducted at local scales, yet fully understanding

Optimization of spatial resource allocation is crucial for the successful control of invasive species under a limited budget but requires labor‐intensive surveys to estimate population parameters. In this study, we devised a novel framework for the spatially explicit optimization of capture effort allocation using state‐space population models from past capture records. We applied it to a control program

Reef‐building corals, like many long‐lived organisms, experience environmental change as a combination of separate but concurrent processes, some of which are gradual yet long‐lasting, while others are more acute but short‐lived. For corals, some chronic environmental stressors, such as rising temperature and ocean acidification, are thought to induce gradual changes in colonies' vital rates. Meanwhile

The COVID‐19 pandemic and its global response have resulted in unprecedented and rapid changes to most people’s day‐to‐day lives. To slow the spread of the virus, governments have implemented the practice of physical distancing (“social distancing”), which includes isolation within the home with limited time spent outdoors. During this extraordinary time, nature around the home may play a key role

While invasive plant distributions are relatively well known in the eastern United States, temporal changes in species distributions and interactions among species have received little attention. Managers are therefore left to make management decisions without knowing which species pose the greatest threats based on their ability to spread, persist and outcompete other invasive species. To fill this

Integrated population models (IPMs) are widely used to combine disparate data sets in joint analysis to better understand population dynamics and provide guidance for conservation activities. An often‐cited assumption of IPMs is independence among component data sets within the combined likelihood. Dependency among data sets should lead to underestimation of variance and bias because individuals contribute

Most parasites and pathogens infect multiple hosts, but a great deal of variation exists in the role of those hosts in persistence of infection. Understanding which hosts are most important in maintaining parasites can provide a clearer target for infection control. Recently developed empirical and theoretical approaches provide a way to quantify the relative contribution of hosts within a community

Effective management strategies are needed to control expansion of invasive alien plant species and attenuate economic and ecological impacts. While previous theoretical studies have assessed optimal control strategies that balance economic costs and ecological benefits, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the spatial characteristics of individual patches may mediate the effectiveness

Urban forested natural areas are valuable ecological and social resources, but long‐term sustainability of these habitats is challenged by environmental and social factors associated with urban ecosystems. Advances in city‐scale assessments of urban forests have increased the resolution of forest community types and conditions, allowing for improved understanding of ecological function, such as natural

Ecological niche models (ENMs) have classically operated under the simplifying assumptions that there are no barriers to gene flow, species are genetically homogeneous (i.e., no population‐specific local adaptation), and all individuals share the same niche. Yet, these assumptions are violated for most broadly distributed species. Here we incorporate genetic data from the widespread riparian tree species