Long‐distance dispersal (LDD) is an essential event for species colonization and expansion in oceanic island ecosystems. Endozoochory by birds is an important factor promoting the LDD of plant seeds, but its contribution to interisland seed dispersal is still unclear. Here, we show possible seed dispersal by a seed predator pigeon, the Japanese wood pigeon Columba janthina, among oceanic islands in

Scatter‐hoarding small mammals act as both seed predators and seed dispersers in forest ecosystems. Their choices regarding consuming or caching seeds must balance the risk of predation with the energy rewards gained from immediate or delayed consumption of seeds. Several factors influence their interaction with seeds, including the individual's personality. Little is known about how personality affects

Ecological theorists have generated several yet unresolved disputes that try to untangle the difficulty in understanding the nature of complex ecological communities. In this paper, we combine two recent theoretical approaches that used together suggest a promising way to consider how evolutionary and ecological processes may be used to frame a general theory of community ecology and its functional

Despite their interdependence, community ecology and evolutionary biology have proven difficult to synthesize empirically in studies of community assembly. This is primarily due to differing temporal and spatial scales of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, ranging from broad‐scale processes like speciation and environmental filtering to local‐scale past and present‐day niche dynamics. Phylogenetic

Invasive species are one of the main threats to biodiversity worldwide and the processes enabling their establishment and persistence remain poorly understood. In generalist consumers, plasticity in diet and trophic niche may play a crucial role in invasion success. There is growing evidence that invasive ants, in particular, occupy lower trophic levels in their introduced range compared to the native

The presence and strength of trophic cascades can be a function of the local abiotic environment and relative abundance of key species. The reintroduction and expansion of sea otters Enhydra lutris, a known keystone species in kelp ecosystems, in southeast Alaska provides a rare natural experiment to test the generality of a apex‐predator – seagrass trophic cascades across a broad spatial scale. We

Anthropogenic pressures alter the biodiversity, structure and organization of biological communities with severe consequences for ecosystem processes. Species invasion is such a human‐induced ecosystem change with pronounced impacts on recipient ecosystems. Around the globe, earthworms invade habitats and impact abiotic soil conditions and a wide range of above‐ and belowground organisms. In northern

Subsequent to escape from intense herbivory in the native range, invasive plants are expected to reduce allocation to costly anti‐herbivory defences and have greater competitive ability than co‐occurring native species. Given that invasive alien plants often occur in open habitats where light is less limited, it is reasonable to hypothesize that invasive plants should express high concentrations of

Predation is a well‐studied driver of ecological selection on prey traits, which frequently drives divergence in anti‐predator performance across environments that vary in predation risk. However, predation also alters prey mortality regimes, where low predation risk often results in higher prey densities and consequently higher intensities of intraspecific resource competition. In addition, predation

Species differ widely in their strategies of resource allocation to offspring mass and number, ranging from teleost fishes and amphibians that produce many tiny offspring to reptiles and mammals that produce relatively few large offspring. Tradeoffs between offspring survivorship and fecundity are thought to limit the success of any particular reproductive strategy, but these tradeoffs have not been

The evolution of dispersal tendencies and of cognitive abilities have both been intensely studied. Yet little attention has been given to the question of how these two aspects may relate to each other, as a result of their joint evolution. On the one hand, learning abilities may help dispersers to cope with their new habitat. On the other hand, dispersal may sometimes reduce the need for learning,

Physiological processes vary widely across individuals and can influence how individuals respond to environmental change. Repeatability in how metabolic rate changes across temperatures (i.e. metabolic thermal plasticity) can influence mass‐scaling exponents in different thermal environments. Moreover, repeatable plastic responses are necessary for reaction norms to respond to selective forces which

Many organisms escape from lethal climatological conditions by entering a resistant resting stage called diapause, which needs to be optimally timed with seasonal change. As climate change exerts selection pressure on phenology, the evolution of mean diapause timing, but also of phenotypic plasticity and bet‐hedging strategies is expected. The potential of the latter strategy as a means of coping with

Anthropogenic provisioning of food to wildlife is ubiquitous across the globe. It may be intentional such as in the form of bird feeders or offering of food to animals by tourists, or unintentional when animals use anthropogenic food sources like crops, plantations or garbage dumps. Provisioning has profound effects on wildlife ecology and behaviour, but the consequences of these changes to mutualistic

A central theme in ecological research is to understand how species interactions contribute to community dynamics. Species interactions are the basis of parametric (model‐driven) and nonparametric (model‐free) approaches in theoretical and empirical work. However, despite their different interpretations across these approaches, these measures have occasionally been used interchangeably, limiting our

Modern human societies have negatively impacted native species richness and their adaptive capacity on every continent, in clearly contrasting ways. We propose a general model to explain how the sequence, duration and type of colonising society alter native species richness patterns through changes in evolutionary pressures. These changes cause different ‘filtering effects' on native species, while

Complex spatial patterns are common in coastal marine systems, but mechanisms underlying their formation are disputed. Most empirical work has focused on exogenous spatially structured disturbances as the leading cause of pattern formation in species assemblages. However, theoretical and observational studies suggest that complex spatial patterns, such as power laws in gap‐size distribution, may result

The mass ratio (MRH) and niche complementarity (NCH) hypotheses can explain how leaf trait composition drives decomposition, an ecosystem process linked to nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration. However, few studies have used an experiment designed to disentangle the role of the mechanisms proposed by these hypotheses. This is especially true regarding the role of leaf functional traits for decomposition

Body size or mass is one of the main factors underlying food webs structure. A large number of evolutionary models have shown that indeed, the adaptive evolution of body size (or mass) can give rise to hierarchically organised trophic levels with complex between and within trophic interactions. However, these models generally make strong arbitrary assumptions on how traits evolve, casting doubts on

Demographic heterogeneity influences how populations respond to density dependent intraspecific competition and trophic interactions. Distinct stages across an organism's development, or ontogeny, are an important example of demographic heterogeneity. In consumer populations, ontogenetic stage structure has been shown to produce categorical differences in population dynamics, community dynamics and

Human‐induced changes in biogeochemical cycles alter the availability of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the environment, leading to changes in the elemental stoichiometry of primary producers. These changes in elemental ratios may, in turn, alter the degree of stoichiometric mismatch between primary producer hosts and their pathogens. Here, we outline how ecological stoichiometry could

The ant mosaic is a concept of the non‐random spatial distribution of individual ant species in trees built upon the assumption of interspecific behavioural associations. However, colony identity and environmental variance may also play a role in species distribution. Here we assess the presence of ant mosaics in a primary forest ecosystem and whether they are structured by species' aggressive behaviours

Consequences of climate change‐driven shifts in the relative timing of spring activities of interacting species are insufficiently understood, especially for insects. We use a controlled experiment which simulates a trophic mismatch scenario in which lepidopteran larvae predominately feed on older leaves due to foliage developing faster than larvae growth rates. As a case study our experiment uses

Marine ambient sound levels have risen due to noisy human activities, such as shipping, fishing, seismic surveys and piling for windfarms. Marine mammals and fishes are two prominent taxonomic groups that are exposed to this noise pollution, which may experience detrimental effects at the population level. Acoustic effects on individual behaviour such as deterrence, disturbance, distraction and masking

Biodiversity science encompasses multiple disciplines and biological scales from molecules to landscapes. Nevertheless, biodiversity data are often analyzed separately with discipline‐specific methodologies, constraining resulting inferences to a single scale. To overcome this, we present a topic modeling framework to analyze community composition in cross‐disciplinary datasets, including those generated

Alien plant species invasiveness and impact on diversity (i.e. species richness and composition) can be driven by the altered competitive interactions experienced by the invader in its invaded range compared to its native range. Trait‐based competition effects on invasiveness can be mediated through size‐asymmetric competition, i.e. a trait suit of the invader that drives competitive dominance, and

Allelopathy plays an important role in the successful invasion of alien invasive plants. Phenolic compounds are one of the primary classes of secondary metabolites with strong allelopathic activities. Polyploidy can cause significant effects on the production and yield of plant secondary metabolites. However, the effect of allelopathic potential of phenolic compounds on the competitiveness of different

Numerous pressures influence the ecological capacity and health of drylands globally. Shrubs are often a critical component of these systems and can function positively as foundation species through facilitation of other species. Nonetheless, limited attention has been paid to the potential negative and indirect effects of shrubs. Here, we tested the hypothesis that plant facilitation can both accelerate

Climate change is having multiple impacts on marine species characterized by sedentary adult and pelagic larval phases, from increasing adult mortality to changes in larval duration and ocean currents. Recent studies have shown impacts of climate change on species persistence through direct effects on individual survival and development, but few have considered the indirect effects mediated by ocean

Ecosystem processes vary temporally due to environmental fluctuations, such as when variation in solar energy causes diurnal cycles in primary production. This normal variation in ecosystem functioning may be disrupted and even lost if taxa contributing to functioning go extinct due to environmental stress. However, when communities are exposed to the stress at sub‐lethal levels over several generations

Research on seed‐dispersal mutualisms has been highly unbalanced towards the plants, largely overlooking the fitness effects of fruit resources on frugivorous animals. Moreover, despite morphological mismatches like gape limitation may reduce the abundance of fruits that are actually accessible to a frugivore species, there is very little evidence on the trait‐matching implications from a frugivore's

Migration has an important impact on the transmission of pathogens. Migratory birds disperse parasites through their routes and may consequently introduce them to new areas and hosts. Hence, haemosporidian parasites, which are among the most prevalent, diverse and important bird pathogens, are potentially dispersed when infecting migrant hosts. Further, migrant hosts could enhance local parasite prevalence

Many ecological community dynamics display some degree of directionality, known as succession patterns. But complex interaction networks frequently tend to non‐directional dynamics such as chaos, unless additional structures or mechanisms impose some form of, often fragile or shot‐lived, directionality. We exhibit here a novel property of emergent long‐lasting directionality in competitive communities

A recent compilation of traits across culturable species of bacteria and archaea allows relationships to be quantified between genome size and other traits and habitat. Cell morphology, size, motility, sporulation and doubling time were not strongly correlated with genome size. Aerobic species averaged ca 35% larger genomes than anaerobic, adjusted for growth temperature. Aerobes had a similar mix

In arctic and boreal ecosystems, ground bryophytes play an important role in regulating carbon (C) exchange between vast belowground C stores and the atmosphere. Climate is changing particularly fast in these high‐latitude regions, but it is unclear how altered precipitation regimes will affect C dynamics in the bryosphere (i.e. the ground moss layer including senesced moss, litter and associated biota)

Ecological systems can show complex and sometimes abrupt responses to environmental change, with important implications for their resilience. Theories of alternate stable states have been used to predict regime shifts of ecosystems as equilibrium responses to sufficiently slow environmental change. The actual rate of environmental change is a key factor affecting the response, yet we are still lacking

Interactions are key drivers of the functioning and fate of plant communities. A traditional way to measure them is to use pairwise experiments, but such experiments do not scale up to species‐rich communities. For those, using association networks based on spatial patterns may provide a more realistic approach. While this method has been successful in abiotically‐stressed environments (alpine and

Predation often deviates from the law of mass action: many micro‐ and meso‐scale experiments have shown that consumption saturates with resource abundance, and decreases due to interference between consumers. But does this observation hold at macro‐ecological scales, spanning many species and orders of magnitude in biomass? If so, what are its consequences for large‐scale ecological patterns and dynamics

Understanding the mechanisms underlying community assembly helps to define success and susceptibility to biological invasions. Here, we explored phytoplankton community assembly following niche and neutral paradigms and using a trait‐based approach. Under the hypothesis that the morphology‐based functional groups (MBFG) clusters species with similar niche, we analysed how trait‐related differences

Cryptic species are morphologically identical but genetically distinct, and are prominent across numerous phyla. The coexistence of such closely related species on local scales would seem to run counter to traditional coexistence and competition theory; it has been hypothesized as a consequence of differences in their resource use or tolerances to environmental conditions. We developed an individual‐based

Nectar robbers are animals that extract nectar through holes made in floral tissues. This behaviour has a wide spectrum of consequences for the plant that range from negative, to neutral, to positive according to life history traits of the interacting organisms and the ecological mechanisms involved. Lonicera etrusca has long tubular flowers producing large quantities of nectar and undergoing high

The exploration of mechanisms that enable species coexistence under competition for a sole limiting resource is widespread across ecology. Two examples of such facilitative processes are intraspecific competition and spatial self‐organisation. These processes determine the outcome of competitive dynamics in many resource‐limited patterned ecosystems, classical examples of which include dryland vegetation

Climate and land use change can alter the incidence and strength of biotic interactions, with important effects on the distribution, abundance and function of species. To assess the importance of these effects and their dynamics, studies quantifying how biotic interactions change in space and time are needed.

Individual variation in disturbance vulnerability (i.e. the likelihood that disturbance negatively affects an individual's fitness) can affect how disturbance impacts animal populations, as even at low disturbance levels some individuals could be severely affected and die. Individual variation in vulnerability can arise due to different responses to disturbance. We propose a new hypothesis that even

Multi‐infections may result in either competitive exclusion or coexistence on the same host of pathogen genotypes belonging to the same or different species. Epidemiological consequences of multiple infections, particularly how the development and transmission of a pathogen can be modified by the presence of another pathogen, are well documented. However, understanding how life history strategies of

The standing dead phase is an important stage in the decomposition of emergent vegetation in marsh wetlands, yet few studies have examined how intrinsic litter traits constrain rates of standing litter decomposition or fungal colonization across plant tissue types or species. To address broad constraints on the decomposition of standing dead litter, we conducted a systematic survey of emergent standing

Understanding the demographic responses of wild animal populations to different factors is fundamental to make reliable prediction of population dynamics. Both bottom–up processes and top–down regulation operate in terrestrial and marine ecosystems, but their relative contribution remains insufficiently known. In addition, direct weather effects on demographic rates have been overlooked in marine ecosystems

Metabolic plasticity in response to different environmental conditions is widespread across taxa. It is reasonable to expect that such plasticity should be adaptive, but only few studies have determined the adaptive significance of metabolic plasticity by formally estimating selection on metabolic rate under different environmental conditions. We used a model marine colonial invertebrate, Bugula neritina

The generality and drivers of rarity, defined along the axes of geographic range, population size and habitat specificity, have received considerable scientific attention for well over a century. Yet, studies that examine rarity holistically among these three attributes are limited, especially among invertebrate and marine taxa. The perceived paradox of deep‐sea species, with often low population size

Ecological stoichiometry seeks to understand the ecological consequences of elemental imbalances between consumers and their resources. Therein, the well‐accepted growth rate hypothesis (GRH) states that organisms exhibiting rapid growth have higher phosphorus (P) demand – and thus lower C:P and N:P ratios – than slow growing ones, due to a higher allocation to P‐rich rRNA. However, GRH has rarely

Temperature and precipitation are two major factors determining arthropod population densities, but the effects from these climate variables are seldom evaluated in the same study system and in combination with inter‐ and intraspecific density dependence. In this study, I used a 19 year time series on plant variables (shoot height and flowering incidence) and insect density in order to understand direct

Loss of resilience in population numbers in response to environmental perturbations may be predicted with statistical metrics called early warning signals (EWS) that are derived from abundance time series. These signals, however, have been shown to have limited success, leading to the development of trait‐based EWS that are based on information collected from phenotypic traits such as body size. Experimental

Three metrics of species diversity – species richness, the Shannon index and the Simpson index – are still widely used in ecology, despite decades of valid critiques leveled against them. Developing a robust diversity metric has been challenging because, unlike many variables ecologists measure, the diversity of a community often cannot be estimated in an unbiased way based on a random sample from

Enviro–climatic changes are thought to be causing alterations in ecosystem processes through shifts in plant and microbial communities; however, how links between plant and microbial communities change with enviro–climatic change is likely to be less straightforward but may be fundamental for many ecological processes. To address this, we assessed the composition of the plant community and the prokaryotic

Positive species interactions such as facilitation are important for enabling species to persist, especially in stressful conditions, and the nature and strength of facilitation varies along physical and biological gradients. Expansion of coastal infrastructure is creating hotspots of invasive species which can spillover into natural habitats, but the role of positive species interactions associated

Understanding demographic responses to mortality is crucial to predictive ecology. While classic ecological theory posits reductions in population biomass in response to extrinsic mortality, models containing realistic developmental change predict the potential for counterintuitive increase in stage‐specific biomass, i.e. biomass overcompensation. Patterns of biomass overcompensation should be predictable

A major challenge in ecology is to understand how populations are affected by increased climate variability. Here, we assessed the effects of observed climate variability on different organismal groups (amphibians, insects, mammals, herbaceous plants and reptiles) by estimating the extent to which interannual variation in the annual population growth rates (CVλ) and the absolute value of the long‐term

Climate change affects insects in several ways, including phenological shifts that may cause asynchrony between herbivore insects and their host plants. Insect larvae typically have limited movement capacity and are consequently dependent on the microhabitat conditions of their immediate surroundings. Based on intensive field monitoring over two springs and on larger‐scale metapopulation‐level survey

High rates of climate change are currently exceeding many plant species' capacity to keep up with climate, leading to mismatches between climatic conditions and climatic preferences of the species present in a community. This disequilibrium between climate and community composition could diminish, however, when critical climate thresholds are exceeded, due to population declines or losses among the