Ecology Letters最新文献

The island species–area relationship (ISAR) describes how larger islands support more species. ISARs of isolated oceanic archipelagos, assembled over millions of years, typically show positive relationships, steep slopes, and species richness equilibrium. However, it remains unclear how quickly such characteristics emerge. We compiled a dataset for fish communities of 79 postglacial peri-Alpine lakes and report an ISAR, formed de novo in less than 15,000 years, that partially mirrors older systems, but has an asymptotic shape. Immigration and speciation, the main ISAR drivers, are primarily associated with area and depth, respectively. Immigration increases with area, while speciation is promoted by greater depth, likely due to species depletion in the source pool and ecological constraints on speciation. This young ISAR has been reshaped by anthropogenic activities, with species introductions erasing its asymptotic shape. We demonstrate that ISARs can develop rapidly after insular habitat formation, offering insights into patterns of biodiversity assembly.

Ecological responses to climate extremes vary drastically in different spatiotemporal contexts. Here, we investigate how soil communities at high- and low-elevation sites respond to extreme heat events in different seasons (spring, summer and autumn). We simulated 1-week heat events based on site-specific climatic history in laboratory experiments using 360 field-collected soil cores and measured the resistance and recovery of two major groups of soil biota: Collembola and fungi. We found that Collembola communities from low elevations exhibited the lowest resistance to extreme heat in spring and summer, with full recovery occurring primarily in spring soils. Fungal communities remained generally stable, though pathogens increased their relative abundances following summer heat events. Network analysis revealed increased connectance of negative associations between Collembola and fungi in response to extreme heat. We provide experimental evidence for how heat events can restructure and destabilise ecological communities depending on spatiotemporal contexts like elevation and seasonality.

Understanding the balance between deterministic and stochastic processes in community assembly is crucial for interpreting ecological community dynamics. Moreover, it provides perspective for conservation and management actions, as deterministic processes can be subject to targeted interventions, but stochastic processes are less manageable. Through a spatially explicit macrozoobenthic monitoring campaign consisting of 1323 sampling locations in the Dutch Wadden Sea, we examined the relative importance of deterministic and stochastic processes, including the role of hydrodynamic disturbance gradients. We found species-based community assembly to be mainly driven by stochastic processes, while trait-based assembly was more deterministic and environmentally driven. Environmental disturbance levels minimally affected the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic processes. For coastal benthic ecosystems, we therefore recommend management actions to target specific desired functional groups rather than specific changes in community composition.

Human activities continue to facilitate biological invasions, profoundly impacting our environment and economy. Plants and insects constitute the majority of invasions to date, with facilitative links established between them, particularly in terrestrial habitats. These relationships remain understudied in aquatic environments, including potential associations between aquatic invasive plants and disease vectors such as mosquitoes. Here, we synthesise current knowledge on the co-occurrence of aquatic invasive plants and mosquitoes, identify key research gaps and present a conceptual framework underpinned by testable hypotheses on how aquatic invasive plants may influence immature and adult mosquito populations. We provide evidence suggesting that these plant-mosquito relationships could pose previously unrecognised risks and highlight priority areas for future research to better understand the potential public health implications of aquatic plant invasions. We call for targeted in situ and ex situ investigations to test the proposed hypotheses and increase our understanding of the interactions between aquatic invasive plants and mosquito population dynamics. Testing these hypotheses will inform adaptive, evidence-based management strategies to simultaneously control aquatic invasive species and vector mosquitoes.

Theory suggests that large social groups of carnivores should be unsustainable, due to reduced foraging efficiency because of overlapping perception radii. Using Serengeti lions as a case study, we apply behaviourally based foraging models to show that fragmentation of social groups into smaller subgroups or mutual cooperation during hunting are both plausible hypothetical mechanisms capable of sustaining larger lion prides. Data from the Serengeti ecosystem demonstrate that lion prides typically fragment into small hunting groups that are well approximated by an exponential distribution of group sizes typical of fission-fusion social systems. A model linking fission-fusion group dynamics with predator–prey interaction predicts both the surprising degree of population stability of the Serengeti lions as well as the long-term persistence of large prides. There is little evidence, however, that Serengeti lions cooperate during hunting except when they hunt Cape buffalo, so fission-fusion is apparently the dominant stabilising process in Serengeti.

While parachute and helicopter science have been condemned for marginalizing researchers from the Global South, we argue that a new practice, which we call “remote-control science”, is becoming increasingly common. In this model, researchers frequently based in the Global North retain decision-making power over questions, methods, funding, and publications without being physically present in the study sites. Local collaborators, despite leading fieldwork, are often relegated to marginal roles with limited resources and authorship recognition. Remote-control science is especially evident in large-scale and macroecological studies, where global datasets are rapidly assembled while local knowledge and validation are overlooked. These dynamics are not limited to North–South relations: they also occur within and between countries, when well-funded scientific urban institutions overshadow peripheral ones. We identify the risks of this practice and propose actions to promote more equitable collaborations: early involvement, recognition of local knowledge, fair authorship, capacity building, and improved funding. Confronting remote-control science is essential for decolonizing ecology.

Understanding stability is crucial for predicting ecological responses to environmental fluctuations. While the diversity-stability relationship is well studied, the role of species' fundamental responses remains underexplored. We investigate how the distribution of species' fundamental responses, captured by a novel metric—imbalance—drives community stability through asynchrony and population stability. Using a protist microcosm experiment, we manipulated species richness and response distributions (defined as interspecific variation in species performance curves) under fluctuating temperature at different nutrient concentrations. Results show that lower imbalance leads to higher temporal stability, while richness has no effect. Structural equation modelling revealed that asynchrony and population stability explain 90% of the variation in stability. Imbalance estimated from monocultures predicted community stability, suggesting that fundamental species responses drove community stability. This study offers new insights into the responses of ecological systems to environmental change.

The cover image is based on the article Delicate Trade-Offs: Nonlinear Multiple Biotic Constraints on Absorptive Fine Root Lifespan Across Trees by Zeqing Ma et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/ele70210

As environments worldwide change at unprecedented rates during the Anthropocene, understanding context dependency—how species interactions vary depending on environmental context—is crucial. Combining comparative genomics across 42 angiosperms with transcriptomics, genome-wide association mapping and gene duplication origin analyses, we show for the first time that gene family expansions are important to context-dependent regulation of species interactions. Gene families expanded in mycorrhizal fungi-associating plants display up to 200% more context-dependent gene expression and double the genetic variation associated with mycorrhizal benefits to plant fitness. Moreover, we discover these gene family expansions arise primarily from tandem duplications with > 2-times more tandem duplications genome-wide, indicating gene family expansions continuously supply genetic variation, allowing fine-tuning of context dependency in species interactions throughout plant evolution. Taken together, our results spotlight how widespread gene duplications can provide molecular flexibility required for plant–microbial interactions to match changing environmental conditions.