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The contribution of pollinator‐mediated versus pollinator‐independent interactions to plant reproduction Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-11 Aubrie R. M. James, Monica A. Geber
Pollinator‐mediated and pollinator‐independent interactions both affect plant reproductive success but are often studied independently. Evaluating the separate and cumulative effect of both types of interactions is necessary to understand population dynamics and species coexistence. Here, we ask how interactions during growth and flowering contribute to pollinator‐mediated and pollinator‐independent
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Linking spatial variations in life‐history traits to environmental conditions across American black bear populations Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-04 Lisyanne Metthé, Christian Dussault, Sandra Hamel
Spatial variations in food availability may influence life‐history traits of wildlife species, particularly in capital‐breeding species that store energy when food is widely available and catabolize it during energy‐intensive reproductive periods. The reproductive success of capital breeders is thus highly dependent on the accumulation of fat reserves. Reproductive success may also improve with access
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Mammalian predator co‐occurrence affected by prey and habitat more than competitor presence at multiple time scales Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-31 Sarah B. Bassing, David E. Ausband, Matthew A. Mumma, Sarah Thompson, Mark A. Hurley, Matthew R. Falcy
The behavior and abundance of sympatric predators can be affected by a complex dominance hierarchy. The strength of antagonistic interactions in predator communities is difficult to study and remains poorly understood for many predator assemblages. Predators directly and indirectly influence the broader ecosystem, so identifying the relative importance of competition, prey, and habitat in shaping predator
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Personality, space use, and networks directly and indirectly explain tick infestation in a wild population of lizards Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-28 Eric Payne, David L. Sinn, Orr Spiegel, Stephan T. Leu, Caroline K. Wohlfeil, Stephanie S. Godfrey, Michael G. Gardner, Andrew Sih
Host personality can markedly affect parasite transmission. Especially for parasites with indirect transmission through the environment, the effects of consistent among‐individual differences in behavior may have both direct and indirect components. For example, personality may mediate both how hosts respond to infected individuals and the likelihood that hosts indirectly interact with infected conspecifics
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Hotter temperatures alter riparian plant outcomes under regulated river conditions Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-27 Emily C. Palmquist, Kiona Ogle, Bradley J. Butterfield, Thomas G. Whitham, Gerard J. Allan, Patrick B. Shafroth
Climate change and river regulation alter environmental controls on riparian plant occurrence and cover worldwide. Simultaneous changes to river flow and air temperature could result in unanticipated plant responses to novel environmental conditions. Increasing temperature could alter riparian plant response to hydrology and other factors, while river regulation may exacerbate environmental stress
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Sparse subalpine forest recovery pathways, plant communities, and carbon stocks 34 years after stand‐replacing fire Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-27 Nathan G. Kiel, Eileen F. Mavencamp, Monica G. Turner
Changing global climate and wildfire regimes are threatening forest resilience (i.e., the ability to recover from disturbance). Yet distinguishing areas of “no” versus “slow” postfire forest recovery is challenging, and consequences of sparse tree regeneration for plant communities and carbon dynamics are uncertain. We studied previously forested areas where tree regeneration remained sparse 34 years
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Phenological responses to climate change across taxa and local habitats in a high‐Arctic arthropod community Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-27 Hannah Sørine Gerlich, Martin Holmstrup, Niels M. Schmidt, Toke T. Høye
Climate change has led to pronounced shifts in phenology, varying across taxa. The Arctic is experiencing particularly rapid warming, but long‐term data on phenological changes are rare in this region, especially for arthropods—a diverse taxonomic group that form important links to other trophic levels. Understanding the environmental drivers of arthropod phenological variation is necessary for predicting
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The power and pitfalls of amino acid carbon stable isotopes for tracing origin and use of basal resources in food webs Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-23 Kim Vane, Matthew R. D. Cobain, Thomas Larsen
Natural and anthropogenic stressors alter the composition, biomass, and nutritional quality of primary producers and microorganisms, the basal organisms that synthesize the biomolecules essential for metazoan growth and survival (i.e., basal resources). Traditional biomarkers have provided valuable insight into the spatiotemporal dynamics of basal resource use, but lack specificity in identifying multiple
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Model‐based variance partitioning for statistical ecology Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-16 Torsti Schulz, Marjo Saastamoinen, Jarno Vanhatalo
Variance partitioning is a common tool for statistical analysis and interpretation in both observational and experimental studies in ecology. Its popularity has led to a proliferation of methods with sometimes confusing or contradicting interpretations. Here, we present variance partitioning in a model‐based Bayesian framework as a general tool for summarizing and interpreting regression‐like models
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Explaining the divergence of population trajectories for two interacting waterfowl species Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-13 Daniel Gibson, Todd W. Arnold, Frances E. Buderman, David N. Koons
Identifying the specific environmental features and associated density‐dependent processes that limit population growth is central to both ecology and conservation. Comparative assessments of sympatric species allow for inference about how ecologically similar species differentially respond to their shared environment, which can be used to inform community‐level conservation strategies. Comparative
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Issue Information Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-10
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Ebolavirus evolution and emergence are associated with land use change Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-11 Christian E. Lange, Thomas R. Barnum, David J. McIver, Matthew LeBreton, Karen Saylors, Charles Kumakamba, Sara Lowes, Eduardo Montero, Robert L. Cohen
Anthropogenic land use change facilitates disease emergence by altering the interface between humans and pathogen reservoirs and is hypothesized to drive pathogen evolution. Here, we show a positive association between land use change and the evolution and dispersal of Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) and Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV). We update the phylogeographies of EBOV and SUDV, which reveal that the most recent
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Climatic versus biotic drivers' effect on fitness varies with range size but not position within range in terrestrial plants Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-09 Allison M. Louthan, Aaron W. Baumgardner, Johan Ehrlén, Johan P. Dahlgren, Alexander K. Loomis, William F. Morris
All populations are affected by multiple environmental drivers, including climatic drivers such as temperature or precipitation and biotic drivers such as herbivory or mutualisms. The relative response of a population to each driver is critical to prioritizing threat mitigation for conservation and to understanding whether climatic or biotic drivers most strongly affect fitness. However, the importance
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Increasing variability in resource supply over time disrupts plant–pollinator interactions Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-03 Deanne Redr, Alyssa R. Cirtwill, Riikka Kaartinen, Anna Grunsky, Ian Hogg, Donald McLennan, Claus Rasmussen, Niels Martin Schmidt, Mikko Tiusanen, Johann Wagner, Helena Wirta, Tomas Roslin
Insect–plant interactions are key determinants of plant and insect fitness, providing important ecosystem services around the world—including the Arctic region. Recently, it has been suggested that climate warming causes rifts between flower and pollinator phenology. To what extent the progression of pollinators matches the availability of flowers in the Arctic season is poorly known. In this study
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Tree species controls over nitrogen and phosphorus cycling in a wet tropical forest Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-03 Ann E. Russell, Steven J. Hall, Ricardo Bedoya, Stephanie N. Kivlin, Christine V. Hawkes
Wet tropical forests play an important role in the global carbon (C) cycle, but given current rates of land-use change, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) limitation could reduce productivity in regenerating forests in this biome. Whereas the strong controls of climate and parent material over forest recovery are well known, the influence of vegetation can be difficult to determine. We addressed species-specific
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Partitioning species contributions to ecological stability in disturbed communities Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-25 Charlotte Kunze, Dominik Bahlburg, Pablo Urrutia-Cordero, Maren Striebel, Egle Kelpsiene, Silke Langenheder, Ian Donohue, Helmut Hillebrand
Ecosystems worldwide are experiencing a range of natural and anthropogenic disturbances, many of which are intensifying as global change accelerates. Ecological responses to those disturbances are determined by both the vulnerabilities of species and their interspecific interactions. Understanding how individual species contribute to the (in-)stability of an aggregated community property, or function
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Land-use changes influence climate resilience through altered population demography in a social insect Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-22 Shih-Fan Chan, Dustin R. Rubenstein, Tsung-Wei Wang, Ying-Yu Chen, I-Ching Chen, Dong-Zheng Ni, Wei-Kai Shih, Sheng-Feng Shen
Biodiversity is threatened by both climate and land-use change. However, the synergistic impacts of these stressors and the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study seeks to bridge this knowledge gap by testing two competing hypotheses regarding the concept of the realized thermal niche. The Fixed Niche Breadth hypothesis suggests that a species' thermal niche remains constant despite
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Issue Information Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-11-04
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The primacy of density-mediated indirect effects in a community of wolves, elk, and aspen Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-23 Elaine M. Brice, Eric J. Larsen, Daniel R. Stahler, Daniel R. MacNulty
The removal or addition of a predator in an ecosystem can trigger a trophic cascade, whereby the predator indirectly influences plants and/or abiotic processes via direct effects on its herbivore prey. A trophic cascade can operate through a density-mediated indirect effect (DMIE), where the predator reduces herbivore density via predation, and/or through a trait-mediated indirect effect (TMIE), where
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Climate and management changes over 40 years drove more stress-tolerant and less ruderal weed communities in vineyards Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-23 Marie-Charlotte Bopp, Elena Kazakou, Aurélie Metay, Jacques Maillet, Marie-Claude Quidoz, Léa Genty, Guillaume Fried
Spontaneous plant communities have undergone considerable constraints due to human-mediated changes. Understanding how plant communities are shifting in response to land management and climate changes is necessary to predict future ecosystem functioning and improve the resilience of managed ecosystems, such as agroecosystems. Using Mediterranean weed communities as models of managed plant communities
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Understanding the chemodiversity of plants: Quantification, variation and ecological function Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-14 Hampus Petrén, Redouan Adam Anaia, Kruthika Sen Aragam, Andrea Bräutigam, Silvia Eckert, Robin Heinen, Ruth Jakobs, Lina Ojeda-Prieto, Moritz Popp, Rohit Sasidharan, Jörg-Peter Schnitzler, Anke Steppuhn, Frans M. Thon, Sybille B. Unsicker, Nicole M. van Dam, Wolfgang W. Weisser, Meike J. Wittmann, Sol Yepes, Dominik Ziaja, Caroline Müller, Robert R. Junker
Plants produce a great number of phytochemicals serving a variety of different functions. Recently, the chemodiversity of these compounds (i.e., the diversity of compounds produced by a plant) has been suggested to be an important aspect of the plant phenotype that may shape interactions between plants, their environment, and other organisms. However, we lack an agreement on how to quantify chemodiversity
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Habitat area more consistently affects seagrass faunal communities than fragmentation per se Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-09 Amy H. Yarnall, Lauren A. Yeager, Cori Lopazanski, Abigail K. Poray, James W. Morley, Allen H. Hurlbert, F. Joel Fodrie
Seminal ecological theories, island biogeography and the single large or several small (SLOSS) reserve debate, examine whether large contiguous habitats conserve biodiversity better than multiple smaller patches. Today, delineating the ecological effects of habitat area versus configuration in a fragmentation context remains difficult, and often confounds efforts to understand proximate and ultimate
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Comparing the differing effects of host species richness on metrics of disease Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-04 Michael H. Cortez
Changes in host species richness can alter infection risk and disease levels in multi-host communities. I review theoretical predictions for direct and environmental transmission pathogens about the effects of host additions (or removals) on three commonly used disease metrics: the pathogen community reproduction number (R0) and infection prevalence and infected density in a focal host. To extend this
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Mycorrhizal fungi as critical biotic filters for tree seedling establishment during species range expansions Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-10-02 Jordon C. Tourville, Thomas R. Horton, Martin Dovciak
Global warming has been shifting climatic envelopes of many tree species to higher latitudes and elevations across the globe; however, unsuitable soil biota may inhibit tree migrations into these areas of suitable climate. Specifically, the role of mycorrhizal fungi in facilitating tree seedling establishment beyond natural species range limits has not been fully explored within forest ecosystems.
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The assembly and dynamics of ecological communities in an ever-changing world Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-30 Oscar Godoy, Fernando Soler-Toscano, José R. Portillo, José A. Langa
Alternative perspectives on the maintenance of biodiversity and the assembly of ecological communities suggest that both processes cannot be investigated simultaneously. In this concept and synthesis, we challenge this view by presenting major theoretical advances in structural stability and permanence theory. These advances, which provide complementary views, allow studying the short- and long-term
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Herbivore regulation of savanna vegetation: Structural complexity, diversity, and the complexity–diversity relationship Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-29 Tyler C. Coverdale, Peter B. Boucher, Jenia Singh, Todd M. Palmer, Jacob R. Goheen, Robert M. Pringle, Andrew B. Davies
Large mammalian herbivores exert strong top-down control on plants, which in turn influence most ecological processes. Accordingly, the decline, displacement, or extinction of wild large herbivores in African savannas is expected to alter the physical structure of vegetation, the diversity of plant communities, and downstream ecosystem functions. However, herbivore impacts on vegetation comprise both
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Global change experiments in mountain ecosystems: A systematic review Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-22 Matteo Dainese, Harald Crepaz, Roberta Bottarin, Veronika Fontana, Elia Guariento, Andreas Hilpold, Nikolaus Obojes, Chiara Paniccia, Alberto Scotti, Julia Seeber, Michael Steinwandter, Ulrike Tappeiner, Georg Niedrist
Mountain ecosystems play an important role globally as centers of biodiversity and in providing ecosystem services to lowland populations, but are influenced by multiple global change drivers such as climate change, nitrogen deposition, or altered disturbance regimes. As global change is accelerating and the consequences for humans and nature are intensifying, there is an increasing demand for understanding
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An integrative paradigm for building causal knowledge Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-16 James B. Grace
A core aspiration of the ecological sciences is to determine how systems work, which implies the challenge of developing a causal understanding. Causal inference has long been approached from a statistical perspective, which can be limited and restrictive for a variety of reasons. Ecologists and other natural scientists have historically pursued mechanistic knowledge as an alternative approach to causal
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Parasites disrupt a keystone mutualism that underpins the structure, functioning, and resilience of a coastal ecosystem Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-16 Joseph P. Morton, Brian P. Davis, Taylor A. Walker, India H. Haber, Eve H. Adelson, Brian R. Silliman
Parasites can alter the traits or densities of mutualistic partners, potentially destabilizing mutualistic associations that underpin the structure, functioning, and stability of entire ecosystems. Despite the potentially wide-ranging consequences of such disruptions, no studies have directly manipulated parasite prevalence and/or intensity in a mutualistic partner, nor quantified the resulting community-level
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Thermal biology diversity of bee pollinators: Taxonomic, phylogenetic, and plant community-level correlates Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-05 Carlos M. Herrera
Community-wide assembly of plant–pollinator systems depends on an intricate combination of biotic and abiotic factors, including heterogeneity among pollinators in thermal biology and responses to abiotic factors. Studies on the thermal biology of pollinators have mostly considered only one or a few species of plants or pollinators at a time, and the possible driving role of the diversity in thermal
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The enigmatic life history of the bamboo explained as a strategy to arrest succession Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Aiyu Zheng, Stephen W. Pacala
Bamboos are perennial woody grasses that display an enigmatic mix of traits. Bamboo is highly shade intolerant like early-successional trees. Without secondary xylem, bamboos cannot continue to grow once they reach a maximum height or replace xylem damaged by hydraulic stress and must instead replace each stem after a few years using vegetative propagation via rhizomes. These traits of bamboo would
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Erratum Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-29
Erratum for Hobbs, N. Thompson, Danielle B. Johnston, Kristin N. Marshall, Evan C. Wolf, and David J. Cooper. 2024. “Does Restoring Apex Predators to Food Webs Restore Ecosystems? Large Carnivores in Yellowstone as a Model System.” Ecological Monographs 94(2): e1598. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1598. The authors wish to convey several corrections within the “Discussion: Comparison with other studies
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New theoretical and analytical framework for quantifying and classifying ecological niche differentiation Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-11 Alfredo Ascanio, Jason T. Bracken, Martin Henry H. Stevens, Tereza Jezkova
Ecological niche differentiation is a process that accompanies lineage diversification and community assembly. Traditionally, the degree of niche differentiation is estimated by contrasting niche hypervolumes of two taxa, reconstructed using ecologically relevant variables. These methods disregard the fact that niches can shift in different ways and directions. Without means of discriminating between
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Fire exclusion alters forest evapotranspiration: A comprehensive water budget analysis in longleaf pine woodlands Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-11 Steven T. Brantley, O. Stribling Stuber, Dakota L. Holder, R. Scott Taylor
Forests are critical to water resources, but high evapotranspiration (ET) can reduce water yield. Thinning and prescribed fire reduce forest density and often reduce ET, promoting higher water yield. However, results from such treatments have been inconsistent, possibly because of unknown interactions among individual ET components. We compare water budget components of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris
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Issue Information Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-01
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Carbon dynamics in high-Andean tropical cushion peatlands: A review of geographic patterns and potential drivers Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-22 Mary Carolina García Lino, Simon Pfanzelt, Alejandra I. Domic, Isabell Hensen, Karsten Schittek, Rosa Isela Meneses, Maaike Y. Bader
Peatlands store large amounts of carbon (C), a function potentially threatened by climate change. Peatlands composed of vascular cushion plants are widespread in the northern and central high Andes (páramo, wet and dry puna), but their C dynamics are hardly known. To understand the interplay of the main drivers of peatland C dynamics and to infer geographic patterns across the Andean regions, we addressed
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Using mobile acoustic monitoring and false-positive N-mixture models to estimate bat abundance and population trends Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-19 Bradley J. Udell, Bethany Rose Straw, Susan C. Loeb, Kathryn M. Irvine, Wayne E. Thogmartin, Cori L. Lausen, Jonathan D. Reichard, Jeremy T. H. Coleman, Paul M. Cryan, Winifred F. Frick, Brian E. Reichert
Estimating the abundance of unmarked animal populations from acoustic data is challenging due to the inability to identify individuals and the need to adjust for observation biases including detectability (false negatives), species misclassification (false positives), and sampling exposure. Acoustic surveys conducted along mobile transects were designed to avoid counting individuals more than once
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Why are there so many definitions of eutrophication? Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-06-27 Alexandrine Pannard, Philippe Souchu, Christian Chauvin, Monique Delabuis, Chantal Gascuel-Odoux, Erik Jeppesen, Morgane Le Moal, Alain Ménesguen, Gilles Pinay, Nancy N. Rabalais, Yves Souchon, Elisabeth M. Gross
Because of the first observations in the 1900s of the oligotrophic and eutrophic states of lakes, researchers have been interested in the process that makes lakes become turbid because of high phytoplankton biomass. Definitions of eutrophication have multiplied and diversified since the mid-20th century, more than for any other ecological process. Reasons for the high number of definitions might be
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Increasing disturbance frequency undermines coral reef recovery Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Michael J. Emslie, Murray Logan, Peran Bray, Daniela M. Ceccarelli, Alistair J. Cheal, Terry P. Hughes, Kerryn A. Johns, Michelle J. Jonker, Emma V. Kennedy, James T. Kerry, Camille Mellin, Ian R. Miller, Kate Osborne, Marji Puotinen, Tane Sinclair-Taylor, Hugh Sweatman
Climate-driven alterations to disturbance regimes are increasingly disrupting patterns of recovery in many biomes. Here, we examine the impact of disturbance and subsequent level of recovery in live hard coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) across the last three decades. We demonstrate that a preexisting pattern of infrequent disturbances of limited spatial extent has changed to larger and more
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Understanding woody plant encroachment: A plant functional trait approach Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-06-22 Inger K. de Jonge, Han Olff, Emilian P. Mayemba, Stijn J. Berger, Michiel P. Veldhuis
The increasing density of woody plants threatens the integrity of grassy ecosystems. It remains unclear if such encroachment can be explained mostly by direct effects of resources on woody plant growth or by indirect effects of disturbances imposing tree recruitment limitation. Here, we investigate whether woody plant functional traits provide a mechanistic understanding of the complex relationships
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How to map biomes: Quantitative comparison and review of biome-mapping methods Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-06-19 Antoine Champreux, Frédérik Saltré, Wolfgang Traylor, Thomas Hickler, Corey J. A. Bradshaw
Biomes are large-scale ecosystems occupying large spaces. The biome concept should theoretically facilitate scientific synthesis of global-scale studies of the past, present, and future biosphere. However, there is neither a consensus biome map nor universally accepted definition of terrestrial biomes, making joint interpretation and comparison of biome-related studies difficult. “Desert,” “rainforest
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Linking aerial hyperspectral data to canopy tree biodiversity: An examination of the spectral variation hypothesis Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Anna L. Crofts, Christine I. B. Wallis, Sabine St-Jean, Sabrina Demers-Thibeault, Deep Inamdar, J. Pablo Arroyo-Mora, Margaret Kalacska, Etienne Laliberté, Mark Vellend
Imaging spectroscopy is emerging as a leading remote sensing method for quantifying plant biodiversity. The spectral variation hypothesis predicts that variation in plant hyperspectral reflectance is related to variation in taxonomic and functional identity. While most studies report some correlation between spectral and field-based (i.e., taxonomic and functional) expressions of biodiversity, the
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A flexible theory for the dynamics of social populations: Within-group density dependence and between-group processes Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Brian A. Lerch, Karen C. Abbott
Despite the importance of population structures throughout ecology, relatively little theoretical attention has been paid to understanding the implications of social groups for population dynamics. The dynamics of socially structured populations differ substantially from those of unstructured or metapopulation-structured populations, because social groups themselves may split, fuse, and compete. These
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Impacts of host availability and temperature on mosquito-borne parasite transmission Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Kyle J.-M. Dahlin, Suzanne M. O'Regan, Barbara A. Han, John Paul Schmidt, John M. Drake
Global climate change is predicted to cause range shifts in the mosquito species that transmit pathogens to humans and wildlife. Recent modeling studies have sought to improve our understanding of the relationship between temperature and the transmission potential of mosquito-borne pathogens. However, the role of the vertebrate host population, including the importance of host behavioral defenses on
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Novel analytic methods for predicting extinctions in ecological networks Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Chris Jones, Damaris Zurell, Karoline Wiesner
Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us how they rely on one another for food, pollination, and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other species in the system and possibly result in their secondary extinction as well. Understanding how (primary) extinctions cause secondary extinctions on ecological networks
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Social foraging and the associated benefits of group-living in Cliff Swallows decrease over 40 years Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Charles R. Brown, Mary B. Brown, Stacey L. Hannebaum, Gigi S. Wagnon, Olivia M. Pletcher, Catherine E. Page, Amy C. West, Valerie A. O'Brien
Animals that feed socially can sometimes better locate prey, often by transferring information about food that is patchy, dense, and temporally and spatially unpredictable. Information transfer is a potential benefit of living in breeding colonies where unsuccessful foragers can more readily locate successful ones and thereby improve feeding efficiency. Most studies on social foraging have been short
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A general, resource-based explanation for density dependence in populations of large herbivores Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 N. Thompson Hobbs
The discipline of ecology seeks to understand how ecosystems, communities, and populations are regulated. A ubiquitous mechanism of population regulation of consumers is that capturing energy and nutrients in sufficient quantities for survival and reproduction becomes more difficult as population density increases. Extensive evidence has revealed that populations of large herbivores are often regulated
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Environmental variation structures reproduction and recruitment in long-lived mega-herbivores: Galapagos giant tortoises Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Stephen Blake, Freddy Cabrera, Sebastian Cruz, Diego Ellis-Soto, Charles B. Yackulic, Guillaume Bastille-Rousseau, Martin Wikelski, Franz Kuemmeth, James P. Gibbs, Sharon L. Deem
Migratory, long-lived animals are an important focus for life-history theory because they manifest extreme trade-offs in life-history traits: delayed maturity, low fecundity, variable recruitment rates, long generation times, and vital rates that respond to variation across environments. Galapagos tortoises are an iconic example: they are long-lived, migrate seasonally, face multiple anthropogenic
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Does restoring apex predators to food webs restore ecosystems? Large carnivores in Yellowstone as a model system Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 N. Thompson Hobbs, Danielle B. Johnston, Kristin N. Marshall, Evan C. Wolf, David J. Cooper
Modification of food webs is a frequent cause of shifts in ecosystem states that resist reversal when the food web is restored to its original condition. We used the restoration of the large carnivore guild including gray wolves (Canis lupis), cougars (Felis concolor), and grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) to the northern range of Yellowstone National Park as a model system to understand how
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Limits to species distributions on tropical mountains shift from high temperature to competition as elevation increases Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-29 Jinlin Chen, Owen T. Lewis
Species turnover with elevation is a widespread phenomenon and provides valuable information on why and how ecological communities might reorganize as the climate warms. It is commonly assumed that species interactions are more likely to set warm range limits, while physiological tolerances determine cold range limits. However, most studies are from temperate systems and rely on correlations between
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Phylogeography and climate shape the quantitative genetic landscape and range-wide plasticity of a prevalent conifer Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Jordi Voltas, Ramon Amigó, Tatiana A. Shestakova, Giovanni di Matteo, Raquel Díaz, Rafael Zas
The contribution of genetic adaptation and plasticity to intraspecific phenotypic variability remains insufficiently studied in long-lived plants, as well as the relevance of neutral versus adaptive processes determining such divergence. We examined the importance of phylogeographic structure and climate in modulating genetic and plastic changes and their interdependence in fitness-related traits of
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Higher metabolic plasticity in temperate compared to tropical lizards suggests increased resilience to climate change: Comment Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Keith Christian, Gavin Bedford, Chava L. Weitzman
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Novel genomic offset metrics integrate local adaptation into habitat suitability forecasts and inform assisted migration Ecol. Monogr. (IF 7.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Susanne Lachmuth, Thibaut Capblancq, Anoob Prakash, Stephen R. Keller, Matthew C. Fitzpatrick
Genomic data are increasingly being integrated into macroecological forecasting, offering an evolutionary perspective that has been largely missing from global change biogeography. Genomic offset, which quantifies the disruption of genotype–environment associations under environmental change, allows for the incorporation of intraspecific climate-associated genomic differentiation into forecasts of