Journals
2026 EN
Dance Maria · Saupe Erin E. · Farnsworth Alex
+2 more
ABSTRACT Rangifer tarandus L. plays a key role in Arctic ecosystems as the most numerous and widespread large herbivore. Sea ice is vital for maintaining genetic connectivity in Arctic islands, yet the historical role of sea ice in shaping R. tarandus biogeography is unknown. We studied the role of sea ice changes and ice sheet retreat since the last glacial period in the timing of island dispersal. We compiled published datasets of mitochondrial control region sequences that informed population history scenarios, which were evaluated in a coalescent‐based approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) modelling framework to test hypotheses of island (re)colonisation and to estimate divergence and admixture. Population events were compared with modelled and proxy‐based paleo‐sea ice cover and published ice sheet chronologies. Our analysis supports Holocene dispersal onto deglaciated Arctic islands, rather than High Arctic glacial refugia. The degree of population admixture and the effect of sea ice were dependent on regional geography and climate history. North American initial island population divergence occurred as sea ice cover was declining. A lack of strong genetic structure and the occurrence of late Holocene admixture suggest that Canadian Arctic Archipelago populations were somewhat connected by sea ice during the Holocene. The Svalbard, Franz Josef land, and West Greenland colonisations arose through long‐distance dispersal. Here, divergence times occurred post‐deglaciation but broadly align with subfossil‐based colonisation estimates, suggesting dispersal limitation due to sea ice conditions, potentially requiring appropriate ocean currents and sea ice drift directionality and speeds. Our study sheds light on the Late Quaternary (~60 ka—present) history of Arctic island Rangifer and suggests that ice sheet retreat, sea ice, and ocean currents were important in shaping present‐day genetic patterns. Regional differences in postglacial dynamics suggest that dispersal during contemporary climate change may vary regionally and depend upon diminishing connectivity provided by sea ice.
Journals
2026 EN
Wagner Laura · Habel Jan Christian · Fungomeli Maria
+2 more
ABSTRACT Habitat destruction and the deterioration of habitat quality are among the main drivers causing worldwide biodiversity loss. The lowland tropical dry forests of the East African coastal region, a hotspot of endemism, have been negatively affected by anthropogenic activities over the last few centuries. Today, only small remnants of these forests with their pristine flora and fauna still exist. It is questionable to what extent the original biodiversity can persist in such small and isolated habitat remnants. Butterflies respond highly sensitively to environmental changes. In this study, we analysed butterfly community structures across a habitat mosaic consisting of natural ecosystems and anthropogenic agro‐environments in southern Kenya. Butterflies were counted along line‐transects in dense forest, along the forest margin, and in neighbouring pastures and orchards; several biotic and abiotic parameters were assessed for all transect sections (e.g., addressing the vegetation structure). Data collection was conducted during the rainy and dry season, as well as during the transition between both seasons. We compiled species specific traits on the butterfly species ecology, distribution, and behaviour. The obtained results revealed significant differentiation among the butterfly communities in natural forest, forest margins, and in the anthropogenic ecosystems. Although both butterfly diversity and abundance were lowest inside the natural forest, vulnerable forest specialist species occurred restricted to the forest and were absent from anthropogenic ecosystems. The butterfly communities found in the agro‐environments were species‐rich if compared with the natural forest ecosystem, but dominated by generalist species. From the dry to the rainy season, species numbers increased in all habitat types, but the number of individuals increased only at forest margins and in pastures. This underlines the buffering effect against drought in forests but also in orchards. In general, our data hat no surrogate habitat exists for typical forest butterflies. This underlines the high ecological relevance of such forest remnants and confirms the necessity of strict conservation of these last remnants of lowland dry forest.
Journals
2026 EN
Pan Xue · Warnke Lara · Zwolski Lennart
+4 more
ABSTRACT The relative importance of deterministic versus stochastic processes in community assembly is widely discussed in ecology. Stochastic models explain community assembly by ignoring the niches of species, whereas deterministic models assume the niche concept to be key for understanding the assembly of species. Whether stochastic or deterministic processes dominate in shaping the community composition of soil animals is gaining increased attention. Here, we investigated the spatial heterogeneity of soil microarthropod communities (Collembola, Oribatida, Mesostigmata) along a salt marsh transect from the upper salt marsh (USM) to the lower salt marsh (LSM) to the pioneer zone (PZ) on three islands, that is, Norderney, Spiekeroog, and Wangerooge, in the Wadden Sea of Germany. We hypothesized that microarthropod communities are predominantly structured by niche‐based processes and change in a deterministic way from the USM to the LSM to the PZ, whereas microarthropod communities differ little between the three islands of similar history and position in the Wadden Sea. Supporting our hypothesis, Oribatida and Mesostigmata communities differed more strongly between the three zones than between the islands indicating that environmental factors changing along the saltmarsh gradient select for specific mite communities in a deterministic way. Collembola communities also differed between the three zones but also between the islands indicating that they are structured by both environmental filtering as well as stochasticity. However, even the differences in mite and Collembola communities between the islands may—at least in part—be explained by environmental filtering, for example, by differences in nutrient input from the Ems river estuarine. Overall, the results indicate that stochasticity plays only a limited role in structuring microarthropod communities in the dynamic marine—terrestrial boundary of salt marshes pointing to the importance of niche differentiation and environmental filtering.
Journals
2026 EN
Santi Francesco · Schrader Julian · Testolin Riccardo
+28 more
Large‐scale biodiversity databases encompass three main types of data for plants, namely single species point occurrences, co‐occurrences in vegetation plots, and checklists for specific areas. Evidence shows that such data types exhibit specific biases, reporting different species assemblages at local scales. We used the Mediterranean Basin, a global biodiversity hotspot with more than 2200 islands larger than 0.01 km 2 , to compare island vascular plant diversity patterns emerging from occurrence data (Global Biodiversity Information Facility; GBIF), vegetation plots (European Vegetation Archive; EVA), and species checklists (Global Inventory of Flora and Traits; GIFT). We aggregated plant data at the island level and compared geographic coverage, inventory completeness, and taxonomic coverage among these data sources. The combined databases accounted for 8702 species distributed on 790 islands (35.6% of the target islands). Data availability increased from small (26.8%) over medium (75.7%) to large islands (100.0%). Spatial coverage of databases on a 30 × 30 km grid was high for GBIF (52.8%) and EVA (45.4%), and low for GIFT (21.7%). GIFT provided higher native and alien species richness values for most of the islands, whereas GBIF and EVA consistently missed a considerable fraction of the expected species richness. Taking GIFT as reference, GBIF, and to a lesser extent EVA, showed a positive bias towards perennial species and an underrepresentation of annuals. Despite their lower taxonomic coverage, GBIF and EVA data can complement our knowledge on Mediterranean islands' plant diversity, providing data for islands lacking plant inventories. Moreover, GBIF and EVA's large datasets can be used for investigating other levels of ecological organisation and modelling single species (GBIF) or population (EVA) trends over space and time. Finally, our results advocate for a coordinated effort to fill the knowledge gaps through data collection and digitisation, possibly integrating data collected by experts by means of citizen science initiatives.
Journals
2026 EN
RodríguezGasol Neus · Boetzl Fabian A. · Chapurlat Elodie
+4 more
Abstract Flower plantings in agricultural landscapes can contribute to sustainable crop production by enhancing pollination and biological control services. However, selecting plant species that promote multiple ecosystem services is challenging, since plants that favor pollinators may not equally foster natural enemies, and potential trade‐offs, such as inadvertently promoting crop pests, must be considered. This complexity increases when accounting for belowground effects. We evaluated 27 candidate plant species for their ability to host functionally important above‐ and belowground organisms—pollinators, natural enemies, herbivores, and decomposers—and assessed how plant characteristics such as floral area, timing of peak bloom, life cycle, and plant cover affect these organism groups. We found that certain plant species have the potential to support several groups of beneficial organisms, suggesting they can enhance multiple ecosystem services. Annual plants had higher abundances of both above‐ and belowground beneficial organisms compared to perennials. Greater plant cover was positively associated with hoverfly abundance. Several functionally important organism groups were positively correlated across plant species, but these positive correlations were not explained by shared responses to plant characteristics. Our findings underscore the significance of plant species identity and characteristics in designing flower plantings for enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services and highlight the importance of including belowground organisms like nematodes in future studies. Our results for specific plant species and plant characteristics can be used to design flower mixtures supporting several ecosystem service providers while considering potential trade‐offs, thereby increasing the efficiency of flower plantings.
Journals
2026 EN
Lerner Joshua E. · Feagin Rusty A. · Huff Thomas P.
+4 more
Abstract In an era of change, the survival and adaptability of ecosystems will be tested. An optimal ecosystem would be both resistant and resilient to negative disturbance but also efficient and redundant in its growth when given positive subsidies. However, initial evidence has suggested that these properties cannot all be maximized at the same time, and so we sought to quantitatively assess whether there are fundamental trade‐offs between them at the ecosystem level. To achieve this aim, we used a 250‐m resolution NASA MODIS dataset of gross primary productivity (GPP) to monitor 145,871 tidal wetland locations across the conterminous United States every 16 days from March 2000 to December 2020. We quantified the size and duration of the perturbation events in tidal wetland GPP ( n = 13,754,386) and modeled their frequency distributions. Event sizes and recurrence intervals were exponentially distributed and event durations were closely modeled by an inverse power law. This scale‐free manner through which tidal wetlands dissipated perturbations to their GPP flux provided them with long‐term stability across a wide range of geography. We also found that a tidal wetland's positive event responses traded off between properties of efficiency and redundancy, its negative events traded off between resistance and resilience, and that all four properties were orthogonally related to one another. We then constructed a conceptual model to help understand the potential mechanism behind this four‐quadrant trade‐off. The trade‐off appeared to be driven by a feedback between the waiting time and magnitude of positive and negative events, the duration of their effects, and the environmental and physical constraints limiting an ecosystem's growth and productivity. In summary, we detail an emergent pattern of trade‐offs and constraints associated with how tidal wetland ecosystems respond to both positive and negative perturbations in carbon flux.
Journals
2026 EN
Hallinger Kelly K. · Pegan Teresa M. · Andersen Michael J.
+18 more
Abstract Dispersal is one of the most important aspects of animal behavior and can have far‐reaching consequences for organismal ecology and evolution. Despite recent theoretical advances in understanding why individuals within the same population vary in dispersal behavior, relatively few studies have empirically evaluated the long‐term causes and consequences of variable dispersal within natural populations. In this study, we used life history data collected over the course of 16 years to examine fitness outcomes in 867 known‐age female tree swallows breeding in New York, USA, that differed in their dispersal status: “immigrant” females, defined as dispersers that hatched elsewhere, and “local” females, defined as non‐dispersers that hatched within the study site and returned there after migration to breed. We also compared the life history responses of immigrant and local females to natural variation in weather, nest predation risk, and social environment at their breeding site. Local females were more likely to produce fledglings that recruited into the study area as adults. We also found several instances in which dispersal status interacted with an environmental metric to influence relative fitness, and these responses were largely consistent across life history measures. Overall, immigrant females were relatively resilient to variation in their extrinsic environment, while local females were highly sensitive to environmental conditions at the breeding site, performing relatively well when conditions were benign and faring relatively poorly as conditions became more stressful. We found little evidence that distance dispersed within a study site impacted female fitness, suggesting that the dispersal‐associated differences in fitness that we observed operate mostly across broader spatial scales. Future work should undertake the direct and simultaneous measurement of behavior, physiology, and fitness of immigrant and local females across environmental contexts and should seek to understand whether and how context‐dependent fitness variation of dispersers and non‐dispersers scales up to influence larger ecological and evolutionary processes.
Journals
2026 EN
Cornelissen Tatiana · Mendes Gisele M. · Silveira Fernando A. O.
+29 more
Abstract Leaf herbivory is a ubiquitous ecological interaction that varies significantly in intensity across species, habitats, and biogeographic regions. Although quantification of leaf damage is crucial for understanding many ecological processes, the accuracy and precision of various damage estimation methods used by researchers, including visual estimation, digital image analysis, and artificial intelligence, have not been evaluated and compared. We use a phylogenetically diverse group of tropical plants to compare the accuracy and precision of damage estimation methods and use the results to provide a guide to herbivory estimation that balances the advantages and disadvantages of each method. We found that visual estimation tended to overestimate herbivory levels compared to digital methods but was 15 times faster and improved in accuracy and speed with training. Conversely, deep‐learning algorithms underestimated herbivory relative to image analysis with ImageJ when it was on the margin, but showed similar accuracy for damage inside of leaf margins. Our results indicate that while visual methods allow for rapid assessment of large sample sizes and are suitable for detecting broad patterns of damage, image analysis is crucial for accurate and precise quantification. The disadvantages of each method, however, can be minimized through proper training and efficient use of each tool, and we therefore provide a guide of practical approaches to herbivory estimation.
Journals
2026 EN
Sorouri Bahareh · Bernardin Jessica · Favier Ariel Ignacio
+3 more
Abstract Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature, representing a significant portion of global biodiversity and playing vital roles in ecosystem functions, biogeochemical cycles, and organismal health. The growing recognition of microbial importance and their potential to address ecological and global challenges has inspired a renewed interest and innovation in microbial ecology. This field has benefited immensely from sequencing technologies that allow scientists to explore diversity at scales previously unimaginable. While the rapid growth of the field has offered significant positive advancements and foreshadows promising potential, there are aspects that need careful consideration. New technology has led to exponential growth in available microbial data, yet not everyone has easy access to sequencing technology, data mining and analysis tools, or the time to acquire new skills. Thus, we are at a crossroads in ensuring that these resources are accessible for all, and that traditional methods of microbiology are still appreciated as tools to progress the field in meaningful ways. As early‐career researchers, we want to raise these points as principles for shaping the future of microbial ecology. Here, we outline a vision for a more accessible, united, and responsible microbial ecology field, one with applications equipped to address the needs of both society and the environment. To democratize the field, we advocate to destigmatize microbes and increase awareness of their beneficial roles by integrating microbes into early education. We believe unity and collaboration among microbial ecologists, as well as with professionals and community members in other STEM fields, are essential for advancing the field. Data should be accessible and standardized for collaboration, and greater integration across disciplines is essential to address future ecological challenges effectively and innovatively. It is our responsibility to ensure that we are asking relevant research questions with the potential to engage with socio‐environmental issues and prioritize sustainable practices. As a collective field, our research should strive to not only expand scientific knowledge but also support community resilience and policy‐making for a sustainable future. Together, this vision will promote a more equitable, diverse, and collaborative future for microbial ecology; and has applications for the broader ecology field.
Journals
2026 EN
Delgado Maria del Mar · Bettega Chiara · Scridel Davide
+5 more
Abstract The loss of both functionally distinct and geographically restricted (i.e., rare) species can limit the capacity of ecological communities to respond to ongoing environmental changes. Mountains, which harbor high biodiversity and unique species, are particularly vulnerable to rapidly shifting climate conditions and remain understudied compared to lowland areas, creating significant global conservation challenges. In this study, we assessed the inter‐relatedness of species' functional distinctiveness, geographic restrictedness, and rarity (i.e., the combination of geographic restrictedness and functional distinctiveness) in the context of thermal niche space for 800 mountain birds breeding in the Holarctic. We demonstrated that mountain bird species in colder thermal niches exhibit distinct trait‐based responses that are spatially non‐stationary and play unique functional roles in their ecosystems, highlighting the combined roles of environmental filtering and functional turnover in shaping mountain bird communities. When linking geographical restrictedness to functional distinctiveness, we found that most rare species occur in mountain areas experiencing high rates of warming. Together, these results highlight the vulnerability of cold‐adapted species or communities of the Holarctic mountains to climate change. Due to the irreplaceable role of functionally distinct species in ecological networks, we anticipate that cold regions within the Holarctic mountains may be particularly susceptible to cascading, climate‐driven species loss and community disruptions. Understanding the linkages between species‐specific vulnerability to climate change and ecosystem functioning is key to preserving the unique ecological and evolutionary characteristics contained within mountains.