Trends in ecology & evolution最新文献

Biodiversity entails species diversity both within a trophic level (horizontal diversity) and across levels (vertical diversity). While invasion resistance studies usually focus on horizontal diversity, vertical diversity could provide additional biotic resistance to invasion. Quantifying the role of such 2D diversity will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the diversity-invasibility relationship.

Symbiotic relationships represent prolonged physical interactions between different species and include various forms such as mutualism, commensalism, exploitation, and competition. Here, we show that the form of symbiosis may change with the densities of the symbiotic partners as they influence the costs and benefits each species experiences. In turn, the form of symbiosis is expected to influence species persistence, population dynamics, and ultimately ecosystem stability. Based on this, we introduce the theoretical concept of a density-symbiosis feedback, where population densities affect the form of symbiosis, and symbiosis form in return affects population dynamics. This dynamic interplay calls for a re-evaluation of traditional ecological concepts and a framework considering the flexibility in symbiosis forms.

Behavior shapes population and community dynamics through feedbacks with habitat configuration and interaction networks. Work on this interplay includes longitudinal surveys, experiments, and models. Multiplayer online video games foster real-time interactions among lots of players in virtual spaces. Data from these games could complement theoretical and empirical work, but research on them is only emerging now. We highlight how these games allow us to track individual movement, decisions, interactions, and performance in a tractable environment. We use our work on the game Dead by Daylight as an example to show that social and predator-prey interactions can generate complex ecoevolutionary dynamics favoring an array of behavioral traits we often study in nature. These games can foster progress in ecoevolutionary and behavioral research.

Within widespread populations, efficient adaptation to local environmental conditions can be facilitated by abundant quantitative variation supplied by short tandem DNA repeats. The peculiar site-specific mutability of such repeats can provide populations with the functional equivalent of tuning knobs for adaptively adjusting quantitative trait values.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses are increasingly spreading between birds and mammals globally, with sporadic transmission to humans. With recent emergence in Antarctica, traditional animal capture and influenza testing approaches have proven challenging and logistically impractical. Without reference laboratories in the region, responses are slow and few samples will ever be collected or tested from local outbreaks due to lack of infrastructure. We call for development of innovative data collection strategies that can be deployed for a diverse range of sample types for rapid, field-forward characterization. Policy shifts and enhanced biosecurity protocols are required to protect Antarctic biodiversity, and we advocate for global coordination and strengthened collaborations between national programs, tour operators, and scientists to establish a 'smart surveillance' network.

Introducing new genes and new species into ecosystems where they have not previously existed presents opportunities and complex, multivalue decisions for conservation biologists and the public. Both synthetic biology and conservation introductions offer potential benefits, such as avoiding extinctions and restoring ecological function, but also carry risks of unintended ecological consequences and raise social and moral concerns. Although the conservation community has attempted to establish guidelines for each new tool, there is a need for comprehensive principles that will enable conservation managers to navigate emerging technologies. Here, we combine biological, legal, social, cultural, and ethical considerations into an inclusive set of principles designed to facilitate the efforts of managers facing high-consequence conservation decisions by clarifying the stakes of inaction and action, along with the use of decision frameworks to integrate multiple considerations.

Extinctions occur when enough individual plants die without replacement to extirpate a population, and all populations are extirpated. While the ultimate drivers of plant extinctions are known, the proximate mechanisms at individual and population level are not. The fossil record supports climate change as the major driver until recently, with land-use change dominating in recent millennia. Climate change may regain its leading role later this century. Documented recent extinctions have been few and concentrated among narrow-range species, but population extirpations are frequent. Predictions for future extinctions often use flawed methods, but more than half of all plants could be threatened by the end of this century. We need targeted interventions tailored to the needs of each threatened species.

Language barriers can severely hinder the advance of conservation science and its contribution to addressing the biodiversity crisis. We build a framework for understanding how language barriers can impede the evidence-based conservation of biodiversity in three ways: barriers to (i) the generation of evidence by non-native English speakers; (ii) the global synthesis of evidence scattered across different languages; and (iii) the application of English-language evidence to local decision making. We provide evidence, building on a growing body of literature, that quantifies the three consequences of language barriers in conservation. We also propose a checklist of solutions for reducing language barriers in conservation by addressing language disparities among scientists, promoting linguistic diversity in conservation, and making conservation science and its communication multilingual.