Ecology Letters最新文献

Taxonomic diversity effects on forest productivity and response to climate extremes range from positive to negative, suggesting a key role for complex interactions among neighbouring trees. To elucidate how neutral interactions, hierarchical competition and resource partitioning between neighbours' shape tree growth and climate response in a highly diverse Amazonian forest, we combined 30 years of tree censuses with measurements of water- and carbon-related traits. We modelled individual tree growth response to climate and neighbourhood to disentangle the relative effect of neighbourhood densities, trait hierarchies and dissimilarities. While neighbourhood densities consistently decreased growth, trait dissimilarity increased it, and both had the potential to influence climate response. Greater water conservatism provided a competitive advantage to focal trees in normal years, but water–spender neighbours reduced this effect in dry years. By underlining the importance of density and trait-mediated neighbourhood interactions, our study offers a way towards improving predictions of forest dynamics.

Vázquez-González, C., B. Castagneyrol, E. W. Muiruri, et al. (2024). “ Tree diversity enhances predation by birds but not by arthropods across climate gradients.” Ecology letters 27, no. 5: e14427. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14427.

In the paper by Vázquez-González et al. (2024), the authors would like to include an additional co-author, Dr. Cee Nell, whose name was inadvertently omitted from the author list in the original version of the publication. This has been corrected in the online version of the article.

The correct order of author names in author byline is as follows.

Carla Vázquez-González^1,2, Bastien Castagneyrol³, Evalyne W. Muiruri⁴, Luc Barbaro⁵, Luis Abdala-Roberts⁶, Nadia Barsoum⁷, Jochen Fründ^8,9,10, Carolyn Glynn¹¹, Hervé Jactel³, William J. McShea¹², Simone Mereu¹³, Kailen A. Mooney¹, Lourdes Morillas¹⁴, Cee Nell¹, Charles A. Nock¹⁵, Alain Paquette¹⁶, John D. Parker¹⁷, William C. Parker¹⁸, Javier Roales¹⁹, Michael Scherer-Lorenzen²⁰, Andreas Schuldt²¹, Kris Verheyen²², Martin Weih¹¹, Bo Yang²³, Julia Koricheva⁴.

We apologize for this error.

Continental islands have long been used as ecological models for understanding species assembly dynamics in isolated habitat fragments. But competition or colonisation constraints might be different to mainland populations, manifesting as expanded or contracted ranges across a geographic distribution of islands in comparison to a mainland population range. Here, we demonstrate that plants on coastal islands do not experience ecological release due to lack of competition, but rather a contracted range at the cool edge in a cross-continental dataset of 843 small coastal islands spanning contrasting environments fringing the Australian coast. We found the cool edge of species ranges across their distribution of small islands averaged 2.2°C warmer in mean annual temperature, or about 4–500 km nearer the equator. The tendency not to colonise islands at the cool edge suggests species may struggle to track their niche poleward as the climate shifts over fragments of habitat on the mainland.

Past work has shown that group formation in foraging animals aids in resource acquisition and reduces the number of interactions with predators. However, group formation can also increase competition for resources among group members. Here, we model how the individual costs and benefits of group formation drive group size. Our model predicts that when competition for resources occurs within and between groups, forager group size will exhibit a one-third power-law relationship with population abundance. However, if groups form due to intragroup competition and predation, we predict either a one-half power-law relationship with population abundance or a constant group size depending on the coupling between predator and prey. Using empirical data on group foraging birds and ungulates, we found a scaling relationship consistent with the one-third power-law, suggesting that hierarchical competition drives the average group size. Our results support work highlighting the importance of density-dependent group formation in maintaining population stability.

Non-native species may cause cumulative impacts on native communities if their abundance continues to increase through time. This negative effect can reflect on the spatial distribution of native species, especially when native and non-native species are phylogenetically similar. Here, we assessed the spatial co-occurrence between native and non-native fish species using long-term abundance data from six locations in a Brazilian floodplain. We tested whether the co-occurrence of native and non-native species is influenced by non-native species abundance and time since first record, and whether the abundance effect is mediated by the phylogenetic relatedness between native and non-native species. We found that non-native abundance was more influential than the time since first record and co-occurrence between native and non-native species was lower when the non-native abundance was high, regardless of phylogenetic relatedness. The interannual variability in non-native species abundance may overshadow long-term trends in determining the temporal effects of non-native species.

Among ecologists, it is widely believed that conservative growth strategies of plants are crucial for sustaining ecosystem stability, while the potential stabilising role of acquisitive strategies has received little attention. We investigated the relationships between plant traits and three stability dimensions—temporal stability, resistance and resilience—using two complementary datasets from drought-affected semi-arid grasslands: a temporal plant community survey from a single site and a 1000-km transect survey with satellite-derived productivity estimates. We found strikingly consistent patterns from the two datasets, with grasslands dominated by acquisitive strategies exhibiting greater resistance and temporal stability of productivity. Acquisitive strategies enhance stability by facilitating drought escape and avoidance, rather than drought tolerance typically associated with conservative strategies. These results highlight the important but underappreciated role of acquisitive strategies in enhancing ecosystem resistance to disturbances and maintaining temporal stability in semi-arid grasslands.