Trends in ecology & evolution最新文献

It is often argued that anisogamy causes alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs) to be more common in males than females. We challenge this view by pointing out logical flaws in the argument. We then review recent work on the diversity of female ARTs, listing several understudied types such as solitary versus communal breeding and facultative parthenogenesis. We highlight an important difference between male and female ARTs that caused female ARTs to be overlooked: male ARTs tend to focus on successful fertilization, whereas female ARTs occur at many stages of reproduction and often form complex networks of decision points. We propose to study correlated female ARTs as a whole to better understand their drivers and eco-evolutionary dynamics.

Intensifying agriculture to spare land for nature could help meet competing food security and biodiversity conservation goals. However, this approach neglects and undervalues agrobiodiversity, currently maintained by millions of smallholder farmers. For intensification to be sustainable and land sparing to be achieved equitably, we must conserve high-agrobiodiversity landscapes.

Interpreting sound gives powerful insight into the health of ecosystems. Beyond detecting the presence of wildlife, bioacoustic signals can reveal their behavior. However, behavioral bioacoustic information is underused because identifying the function and context of animals' sounds remains challenging. A growing acoustic toolbox is allowing researchers to begin decoding bioacoustic signals by linking individual and population-level sensing. Yet, studies integrating acoustic tools for behavioral insight across levels of biological organization remain scarce. We aim to catalyze the emerging field of behavioral bioacoustics by synthesizing recent successes and rising analytical, logistical, and ethical challenges. Because behavior typically represents animals' first response to environmental change, we posit that behavioral bioacoustics will provide theoretical and applied insights into animals' adaptations to global change.

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in collective decision making, particularly the idea that groups can make more accurate decisions compared with individuals. However, nearly all research to date has focused on spatial decisions (e.g., food patches). Here, we highlight the equally important, but severely understudied, realm of temporal collective decision making (i.e., decisions about when to perform an action). We illustrate differences between temporal and spatial decisions, including the irreversibility of time, cost asymmetries, the speed-accuracy tradeoff, and game theoretic dynamics. Given these fundamental differences, temporal collective decision making likely requires different mechanisms to generate collective intelligence. Research focused on temporal decisions should lead to an expanded understanding of the adaptiveness and constraints of living in groups.

Food webs are typically defined as being macro-organism-based (e.g., plants, mammals, birds) or microbial (e.g., bacteria, fungi, viruses). However, these characterizations have limits. We propose a multilayered food web conceptual model where microbial food webs are nested within food webs composed of macro-organisms. Nesting occurs through host-microbe interactions, which influence the health and behavior of host macro-organisms, such that host microbiomes likely alter population dynamics of interacting macro-organisms and vice versa. Here, we explore the theoretical underpinnings of multilayered food webs and the implications of this new conceptual model on food web ecology. Our framework opens avenues for new empirical investigations into complex ecological networks and provides a new lens through which to view a network's response to ecosystem changes.

Invasive alien species negatively impact ecosystems, biodiversity, human societies, and economies. To prevent future invasions, it is crucial to understand both the ecological and the human and social factors determining whether a species is picked up, transported, and introduced beyond their native range. However, we often have little or no information on key human and social factors. Here, we explore how alien species introductions are shaped by a combination of ecological and human and social factors and highlight the potential of the emerging fields of conservation culturomics and iEcology for disentangling their relative importance. We argue that quantifying and assessing the relative importance of the human and social dimensions of alien species introductions can substantially improve our understanding of the invasion process.

The rapid diversification of terminology associated with invasion ecology is a known barrier to effective communication and management. These challenges are magnified by the addition of terms and concepts related to climate-induced range-shifting taxa and/or changes to impacts. Further, institutional policies and terminologies for invasive species introduce new ambiguities when considering climate change. To alleviate communication and application challenges, we introduce a conceptual framework that organizes climate-related invasion terms, revealing ambiguities and gaps. Additionally, we illustrate how these ambiguities can affect management with four case studies and consider situations where resolution can improve policy and management outcomes. The framework can help users avoid inconsistent use of terminology, and prioritize when to address management and policy consequences related to associated terminological ambiguity.

Biodiversity is declining at alarming rates, with some negative impacts caused by activities that are necessary for meeting basic human needs and others which should be avoided to prevent ecological collapse. Avoidance of biodiversity impacts is costly; these costs must be distributed fairly. Principles of fair allocation - which are grounded in longstanding theories of justice and are mathematically operationalizable - are rarely used in biodiversity decision-making but can help to deliver procedural and distributive justice alongside biodiversity outcomes. We show how incorporating rules of fair allocation into biodiversity decision-making could advance policy formulation towards a safe and just future. Such rules provide a means to operationalize equity and create space for cooperatively and constructively negotiating avoidance liabilities within biodiversity impact mitigation.

The dispersal of organisms in the Anthropocene has been profoundly altered by human activities, with far-reaching consequences for humans, biodiversity, and ecosystems. Managing such dispersal effectively is critical to achieve the 2030 targets of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Here, we bring together insights from invasion science, movement ecology, and conservation biology, and extend a widely used classification framework for the introduction pathways of alien species to encompass other forms of dispersal. We develop a simple, global scheme for classifying the movement of organisms into the types of dispersal that characterise the Anthropocene. The scheme can be used to improve our understanding of dispersal, provide policy relevant advice, inform conservation and biosecurity actions, and enable monitoring and reporting towards conservation targets.