In the high Arctic, plant community species composition generally responds slowly to climate warming, whereas less is known about the community functional trait responses and consequences for ecosystem functioning. Slow species turnover and large distribution ranges of many Arctic plant species suggest a significant role of intraspecific trait variability in functional responses to climate change.

Ecologists are often interested in answering causal questions from observational data but generally lack the training to appropriately infer causation. When applying statistical analysis (e.g., generalized linear model) on observational data, common statistical adjustments can often lead to biased estimates between variables of interest due to processes such as confounding, overcontrol, and collider

The alteration of the timing of biological events is one of the best documented effects of climate change, with overwhelming evidence across taxa. Many studies have investigated the phenology of consumers, especially birds. However, most of these studies have focused on specific phenophases, while a global analysis of avian phenological trends during recent climate change across different phases of

Insects provide key pollination services in most terrestrial biomes, but this service depends on a multistep interaction between insect and plant. An insect needs to visit a flower, receive pollen from the anthers, move to another conspecific flower, and finally deposit the pollen on a receptive stigma. Each of these steps may be affected by climate change, and focusing on only one of them (e.g., flower

Global climate change will probably exacerbate crop losses from insect pests, reducing agricultural production, and threatening food security. To predict where crop losses will occur, scientists have mainly used correlative models of species' distributions, but such models are unreliable when extrapolated to future environments. To minimize extrapolation, we developed mechanistic and hybrid models

Long-distance insect migration is poorly understood despite its tremendous ecological and economic importance. As a group, Nearctic hover flies (Diptera: Syrphidae: Syrphinae), which are crucial pollinators as adults and biological control agents as larvae, are almost entirely unrecognized as migratory despite examples of highly migratory behavior among several Palearctic species. Here, we examined

Size-structured differences in resource use stabilize species coexistence in animal communities, but what behavioral mechanisms underpin these niche differences? Behavior is constrained by morphological and physiological traits that scale allometrically with body size, yet the degree to which behaviors exhibit allometric scaling remains unclear; empirical datasets often encompass broad variation in

The usual theoretical condition for coexistence is that each species in a community can increase when rare (mutual invasibility). Traditional coexistence theory implicitly assumes that the invading species is common enough that we can ignore demographic stochasticity, but rare enough that it does not compete with itself, even after it has reached a stationary spatial distribution. However, short-distance

The usual conception of character displacement is of resource competitors differentiating to specialize on different prey in order to reduce competition. However, traits that underlie many predator–prey interactions, such as chase-evade speeds, gape limitation, and toxin concentrations, do not permit such specialization, but instead result in unidirectional evolutionary arms races. Here, we develop

Community interaction webs describe both direct and indirect interactions among species. Changes in direct interactions often become noticeable soon after a perturbation, but time lags in the responses of many species may delay the appearance of indirect effects and lead to temporal or spatial variation in interaction webs. Accurately identifying these shifts in the field requires time-specific, spatially

During the past century, the fundamental niche, the complete set of environments that allow an individual, population, or species to persist, has shaped ecological thinking. It is a crucial concept connecting population dynamics, spatial ecology, and evolutionary theory, and a prerequisite for predictive ecological models at a time of rapid environmental change. Yet, its properties have eluded quantification

We are pleased that submission rates at Ecological Monographs have been increasing for the last four years; they are up 7% from 2020 and 18% from 2019. Perhaps this partly reflects a pandemic bump in author productivity, but 2022 has also started with a high pace of submissions. We are receiving more varied and cross-cutting manuscripts than ever before and the quality of these manuscripts is reflected

In tree canopies, incoming solar radiation interacts with leaves and branches to generate temperature differences within and among leaves, presenting thermal opportunities and risks for leaf-dwelling ectotherms. Although leaf biophysics and insect thermal ecology are well understood, few studies have examined them together in single systems. We examined temperature variability in aspen canopies, Populus

Climate warming and altered disturbance regimes are changing forest composition and structure worldwide. Given that species often exhibit individualistic responses to change, making predictions about the cumulative effects of multiple stressors across environmental gradients is challenging, especially in diverse communities. For example, warming temperatures are predicted to drive species upslope,

Programs that incentivize private landowners to create habitats that offset losses due to conversion and climate change are increasingly being used to bolster sensitive wildlife populations. In the Central Valley of California, shorebird habitat incentive programs pay landowners to create additional habitat during the non-breeding season by flooding their fields. However, it remains unclear how successful

Ecological and evolutionary processes can occur at similar time scales and, hence, influence one another. There has been much progress in developing metrics that quantify contributions of ecological and evolutionary components to trait change over time. However, many empirical evolutionary ecology studies document trait differentiation among populations structured in space. In both time and space,

Understanding long-term forest fire histories of boreal landscapes is instrumental for parameterizing climate–fire interactions and the role of humans affecting natural fire regimes. The eastern sections of the European boreal zone currently lack a network of annually resolved and centuries-long forest fire histories. To fill in this knowledge gap, we dendrochronologically reconstructed the 600-year

Disturbances elicit both positive and negative effects on organisms; these effects vary in their strength and their timing. Effects of disturbance interval (i.e., the length of time between disturbances) on population growth will depend on both the timing and strength of positive and negative effects of disturbances. Climate change can modify the relative strengths of these positive and negative effects

Climate change is causing range shifts of many species to higher latitudes and altitudes and increasing their exposure to extreme weather events. It has been shown that range-shifting plant species may perform differently in new soil than related natives; however, little is known about how extreme weather events affect range-expanding plants compared to related natives. In this study we used outdoor

Vascular epiphytes are an important component of many ecosystems and constitute a substantial part of global plant diversity. In this context, accidental epiphytism, that is, the opportunistic epiphytic growth of typically terrestrial species, deserves special attention because it provides crucial insights into the global distribution of vascular epiphytes and the initial evolution of epiphytic lineages

Environmental factors are common forces driving infectious disease dynamics. We compared interannual and seasonal patterns of anthrax infections in two multihost systems in southern Africa: Etosha National Park, Namibia, and Kruger National Park, South Africa. Using several decades of mortality data from each system, we assessed possible transmission mechanisms behind anthrax dynamics, examining (1)

The evolution of increased competitive ability (EICA) hypothesis encapsulates the importance of evolution and ecology for biological invasions. According to this proposition, leaving specialist herbivores at home frees introduced plant species from investing limited resources in defense to instead use those resources for growth, selecting for individuals with reduced defense, enhanced growth, and,

Stable isotope analysis is increasingly being used to assess diet and trophic positions of animals. Such assessments require estimates of trophic discrimination factors (TDFs)—offset between the isotopic composition of diet and animal tissues—with imprecise applications of TDFs leading to biased conclusions in resource use. Because TDFs are unavailable for most species, ecologists often apply values

Many animals form long-term monogamous pair bonds, and the disruption of a pair bond (through either divorce or widowhood) can have significant consequences for individual vital rates (survival, breeding, and breeding success probabilities) and life-history outcomes (lifetime reproductive success [LRS], life expectancy). Here, we investigated the causes and consequences of pair-bond disruption in wandering

Local biodiversity patterns are expected to strongly reflect variation in topography, land use, dispersal boundaries, nutrient supplies, contaminant spread, management practices, and other anthropogenic influences. Contrary to this expectation, studies focusing on specific taxa revealed a biodiversity homogenization effect in areas subjected to long-term intensive industrial agriculture. We investigated

Biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning can be partitioned into complementarity effects, driven by many species, and selection effects, driven by few. Selection effects occur through interspecific abundance shifts (dominance) and intraspecific shifts in functioning. Complementarity and selection effects are often calculated for biomass, but very rarely for secondary productivity, that is, energy

A major goal of community ecology is understanding the processes responsible for generating biodiversity patterns along spatial and environmental gradients. In stream ecosystems, system-specific conceptual frameworks have dominated research describing biodiversity change along longitudinal gradients of river networks. However, support for these conceptual frameworks has been mixed, mainly applicable

Home ranges (HRs), the regions within which animals interact with their environment, constitute a fundamental aspect of their ecology. HR sizes and locations commonly reflect costs and benefits associated with diverse social, biotic, and abiotic factors. Less is known, however, about how these factors affect intraspecific variation in HR size or fidelity (the individual's tendency to maintain the same

Temperature drives performance and therefore adaptation; to interpret and understand these, thermal performance curves (TPC) are used, often through meta-analyses, revealing trends across divergent taxa. Four discrete hypotheses—thermodynamic-constraint; biochemical-adaptation (hotter is not better); specialist-generalist; thermal-trade-off—have arisen to explain cross-phyletic trends. In contrast

Aerial insectivores show worldwide population declines coinciding with shifts in agricultural practices. Increasing reliance on certain agricultural practices is thought to have led to an overall reduction in insect abundance that negatively affects aerial insectivore fitness. The relationship between prey availability and the fitness of insectivores may thus vary with the extent of agricultural intensity

Interactions among fungi and insects involve hundreds of thousands of species. While insect communities on plants have formed some of the classic model systems in ecology, fungus-based communities and the forces structuring them remain poorly studied by comparison. We characterize the arthropod communities associated with fruiting bodies of eight mycorrhizal basidiomycete fungus species from three

Quantitative understanding of vegetation dynamics over timespans beyond a century remains limited. In this regard, the pollen-based reconstruction of past vegetation enables unique research opportunities by quantifying changes in plant community compositions during hundreds to thousands of years. Critically, the methodological basis for most reconstruction approaches rests upon estimates of pollen

Savanna tree cover often exhibits sudden discontinuities across space. It has been proposed that local spatial processes imposed by variation in tree cover itself (as opposed to by external drivers such as edaphic variation) can reinforce such discontinuities. Despite this, we generally lack data on tree demography and the environmental drivers affecting the former as a function of tree neighborhoods

Characterizing the diversity of demographic strategies among species can inform research in topics such as trait syndromes, community stability, coexistence, and ecological succession. However, this diversity can depend on the spatial scale considered: at the landscape scale, species often form metapopulations, that is sets of local, sometimes short-lived, populations, inhabiting discrete habitat patches

Patterns in functional diversity of organisms at large spatial scales can provide insight into possible responses to future climate change, but it remains a challenge to link large-scale patterns at the population or species level to their underlying physiological mechanisms at the individual level. The climate variability hypothesis predicts that temperate ectotherms will be less vulnerable to climate

Understanding species richness variation among local communities is one of the central topics in ecology, but the complex interplay of regional processes, environmental filtering, and local processes hampers generalization on the importance of different processes. Here, we aim to unravel drivers of spider community assembly in temperate forests by analyzing two independent data sets covering gradients

Climate change is altering interspecific interactions globally, yet community-level responses are difficult to predict due to both the direct and indirect effects of changing abiotic and biotic conditions. Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) are particularly vulnerable to decreasing snow cover and resultant camouflage mismatch. This species shares a suite of predators with alternative prey species including

Autotrophs play an essential role in the cycling of carbon and nutrients, yet disease-ecosystem relationships are often overlooked in these dynamics. Importantly, the availability of elemental nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus impacts infectious disease in autotrophs, and disease can induce reciprocal effects on ecosystem nutrient dynamics. Relationships linking infectious disease with ecosystem

Plant competition may intensify with climate warming, but whether this will occur equally for conspecific and heterospecific competition remains unknown. Competitive shifts have the potential to instigate community change because the relative strengths of conspecific and heterospecific negative density dependence mediate the stabilizing mechanisms underpinning species coexistence. We examined a mature

We explored whether parasites are important in kelp forests by examining their effects on a high-quality, high-resolution kelp-forest food web. After controlling for generic effects of network size, parasites affected kelp-forest food web structure in some ways consistent with other systems. Parasites increased the trophic span of the web, increasing top predator vulnerability and the longest chain

Climate change exposes ecosystems to strong and rapid changes in their environmental boundary conditions mainly due to the altered temperature and precipitation patterns. It is still poorly understood how fast interlinked ecosystem processes respond to altered environmental conditions, if these responses occur gradually or suddenly when thresholds are exceeded, and if the patterns of the responses

Changing climatic conditions are shaping how density mediates resource competition. Colonies of the seed-eating red harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex barbatus, live for about 30 years in desert grassland. They compete with conspecific neighbors for foraging area in which to search for seeds. This study draws on a long-term census of a population of about 300 colonies from 1988 to 2019 at a site near Rodeo

El Niños and marine heatwaves (MHWs) are predicted to increase in frequency under greenhouse warming. The impact of climate oscillations like El Niño-Southern Oscillation on coastal environments in the short term likely mimics those of climate change in the long term; therefore, El Niños may serve as a short-term proxy for possible long-term ecological responses to an increasingly variable climate

A large and growing body of theory has demonstrated how the presence of trait variation in prey or predator populations may affect the amplitude and phase of predator–prey cycles. Less attention has been given to so-called intermittent cycles, in which predator–prey oscillations recurrently disappear and re-appear, despite such dynamics being observed in empirical systems and modeling studies. A comprehensive

The study of ecological networks has progressively evolved from a mostly descriptive science to one that attempts to elucidate the processes governing the emerging structure of multitrophic communities. To move forward, we propose a conceptual framework using trait-based inference of ecological processes to improve our understanding of network assembly and our ability to predict network reassembly

Ecologists working with stable isotopes have to deal with complex datasets including temporal and spatial replication, which makes the analysis and the representation of patterns of change challenging, especially at high resolution. Due to the lack of a commonly accepted conceptual framework in stable isotope ecology, the analysis and the graphical representation of stable isotope spatial and temporal

The terminal investment hypothesis (TIH) predicts that individuals with favorable prospects for future reproduction (i.e., high residual reproductive value, RRV) should moderate current reproductive investment in favor of growth, survival, and future reproduction, whereas those with low RRV should “terminally invest” by diverting somatic resources towards current reproduction at the expense of future

Competition between apex predators can alter the strength of top-down forcing, yet we know little about the behavioral mechanisms that drive competition in multipredator ecosystems. Interactions between predators can be synergistic (facilitative) or antagonistic (inhibitive), both of which are widespread in nature, vary in strength between species and across space and time, and affect predation patterns

Although early theoretical work suggests that competition for light erodes successional diversity in forests, verbal models and recent numerical work with complex mechanistic forest simulators suggest that disturbance in such systems can maintain successional diversity. Nonetheless, if and how allocation trade-offs between competitors interact with disturbance to maintain high diversity in successional

Determining how climate affects biotic interactions can improve understanding of drivers of context-dependence and inform predictions of how interactions may influence plants under future climates. In arid environments, the community-level impacts of seed predators may depend strongly on aridity; yet, long-term studies documenting impacts of granivores on plant communities over variable climate conditions

Reproductive performance typically improves with age, reaching a plateau at middle age and subsequently declining in older age classes (senescing individuals). Three potential non-exclusive mechanisms can explain the improvement in reproductive performance with age: (1) selection (poor quality individuals are removed from the population with increasing age), (2) constraint (individual efficiency increases

The distribution of canopy heights in tropical rain forests directly affects carbon storage and the maintenance of biodiversity. We report results from a unique 20-yr record of annual monitoring of canopy-height distributions across an old-growth tropical rain forest landscape at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. Canopy heights to 15 m were measured annually in 18 0.50-ha plots at 231

The mechanisms driving species co-occurrence are varied and include biotic interactions, abiotic factors, and scale-dependent processes. Based on a comprehensive dataset of lepidopteran herbivores recorded from a large-scale forest biodiversity experiment, we tested the contribution to herbivore species co-occurrence of herbivore phylogenetic relatedness, plant diversity and functional traits, and

Intraspecific trait variation (ITV) is a widespread feature of life, but it is an open question how ITV affects between-species coexistence. Recent theoretical studies have produced contradictory results, with ITV promoting coexistence in some models and undermining coexistence in others. Here we review recent work and propose a new conceptual framework to explain how ITV affects coexistence between

Cumulative impacts assessments on marine ecosystems have been hindered by the difficulty of collecting environmental data and identifying drivers of community dynamics beyond local scales. On coral reefs, an additional challenge is to disentangle the relative influence of multiple drivers that operate at different stages of coral ontogeny. We integrated coral life history, population dynamics, and

There is increasing evidence that spatial and temporal dynamics of biodiversity and ecosystem functions play an essential role in biodiversity–ecosystem-functioning (BEF) relationships. Despite the known importance of soil processes for forest ecosystems, belowground functions in response to tree diversity and spatiotemporal dynamics of ecological processes and conditions remain poorly described. We