This set of data describes resilience in microbial communities in samples taken at the Sourhope experimental site in 2001 by the Scottish Crop Research Institute, the University of Aberdeen and Cranfield University. Data were collected during a project funded under the NERC Soil Biodiversity Programme. The NERC Soil Biodiversity Thematic Programme was established in 1999 and was centred upon the intensive study of a large field experiment located at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute...

1. Human activities can influence the movement of organisms, either repelling or attracting individuals depending on whether they interfere with natural behavioural patterns or enhance access to food. To discern the processes affecting such interactions, an appropriate analytical approach must reflect the motivations driving behavioural decisions at multiple scales. 2. In this study, we developed a modelling framework for the analysis of foraging trips by central place foragers. By recognising the distinction between movement phases...

This dataset comprises enchytraeid worm abundance and Delta 13C values from enchytraeid cholesterol. The data were collected as a component of the NERC Soil Biodiversity Programme, consisting of a one year study of the diversity and activity of Enchytraeid worms, small relatives of the earthworm. These worms are very common in upland soils and often outweigh all other fauna, including sheep. The project focused on investigating the importance of Enchytraeid species, or group diversity, in...

1. Long time-series of primary production are rarely available, restricting our mechanistic understanding of vegetation and ecosystem dynamics under climate change. Dendrochronological tools are increasingly used instead, particularly in the Arctic – the world’s most rapidly warming biome. Yet, high-latitude plant species are subject to strong energy allocation trade-offs, and whether annual allocations to secondary growth (e.g. ‘tree-rings’) actually reflects primary production above-ground remains unknown. Taking advantage of a unique ground-based monitoring time-series of annual...

Quantifying sex-specific additive genetic variance (VA) in fitness, and the cross-sex genetic correlation (rA), is prerequisite to predicting evolutionary dynamics and the magnitude of sexual conflict. Further, quantifying VA and rA in underlying fitness components, and genetic consequences of immigration and resulting gene flow, is required to identify mechanisms that maintain VA in fitness. However, these key parameters have rarely been estimated in wild populations experiencing natural environmental variation and immigration. We used comprehensive pedigree...

One key hypothesis explaining the evolution and persistence of polyandry, and resulting female extra-pair reproduction in socially monogamous systems, is that female propensity for extra-pair reproduction is positively genetically correlated with male reproductive fitness and consequently experiences positive cross-sex indirect selection. However, key genetic correlations have rarely been estimated, especially in free-living populations experiencing natural (co)variation in reproductive strategies and fitness. We used long-term life-history and pedigree data from song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) to estimate...

Temperatures recorded 5cm above the forest floor in a gridded design (1 to 13m distance) within three, 1 hectare forest plots in Sabah, Borneo. The dataset also includes air temperature data from a nearby weather station at the same temporal resolution, and spatially-interpolated measurements of topography and canopy structure in each forest plot at a 1m resolution. iButton temperature measurement 5cm above the forest floor in gridded design (1-13m distance) within three 1-ha forest plots...

The maternal rearing environment can affect offspring fitness or phenotype indirectly via ‘maternal effects’ and can also influence a mother’s behaviour and fecundity directly. However, it remains uncertain how the effects of the maternal rearing environment cascade through multiple trophic levels, such as in plant-insect herbivore-natural enemy interactions. Pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) show differential fitness on host legume species, while generalist aphid parasitoids can show variable fitness on different host aphid species, suggesting that maternal...

1. Management programs worldwide seeking to reduce the density of invasive species must overcome compensatory processes, such as recolonisation by dispersers from non- or partially-controlled areas. However, the scale and drivers of dispersal in such context are poorly known. 2. We investigated the dispersal patterns of American mink reinvading 20,000 km2 of their non-native range following a culling programme led by citizen conservationists. Using multinomial models, we estimated the contributions of density dependence, proxies for...

Data file in csv formatBMdata.csvRcode

Insect distributions are shifting rapidly in response to climate change and are undergoing rapid evolutionary change. We investigate the molecular signatures underlying local adaptation in the range-expanding damselfly, Ischnura elegans. Using a landscape genomic approach combined with generalized dissimilarity modelling (GDM), we detect selection signatures on loci via allelic frequency change along environmental gradients. We analyse 13,612 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), derived from Restriction site-Associated DNA sequencing (RADseq), in 426 individuals from 25 sites spanning...

The cumulative cost of reproduction hypothesis predicts that reproductive costs accumulate over an individual’s reproductive lifespan. While short-term costs have been extensively explored, the prevalence of cumulative long-term costs and the circumstances under which such costs occur alongside or instead of short-term costs, are far from clear. Indeed, few studies have simultaneously tested for both short-term and cumulative long-term reproductive costs in natural populations. Even in mammals, comparatively little is known about cumulative effects of...

1. Understanding the drivers underlying fluctuations in the size of animal populations is central to ecology, conservation biology and wildlife management. Reliable estimates of survival probabilities are key to population viability assessments, and patterns of variation in survival can help inferring the causal factors behind detected changes in population size. 2. We investigated whether variation in age and sex-specific survival probabilities could help explain the increasing trend in population size detected in a small, discrete...

Shared enemies may instigate or modify competitive interactions between species. The dis-equilibrium caused by non-native species introductions has revealed that the outcome of such indirect interactions can often be dramatic. However, studies of enemy mediated competition mostly consider the impact of a single enemy, despite species being embedded in complex networks of interactions. Here we demonstrate that native red and invasive grey squirrels in Britain, two terrestrial species linked by resource and disease-mediated apparent competition,...

Over our species history, humans have typically lived in small groups of under a hundred individuals. However, our face recognition abilities appear to equip us to recognize very many individuals, perhaps thousands. Modern society provides access to huge numbers of faces, but no one has established how many faces people actually know. Here we describe a method for estimating this number. By combining separate measures of recall and recognition, we show that people know about...

The falx cerebri and the tentorium cerebelli are two projections of the dura mater in the cranial cavity which ossify to varying degrees in some mammalian species. The idea that the ossification of these structures may be necessary to support the loads arising during feeding has been proposed and dismissed in the past, but never tested quantitatively. To address this, a biomechanical model of a domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus) skull was created and the...

Snow strongly affects ecosystem functioning in alpine environments with potential carry-over effects outside of snow periods. However, it is unclear whether changes in snow cover affect microbial community functioning in summer. In a field experiment, we tested whether manipulation of snow cover affected the functional capabilities of the microbial community either directly, or indirectly through concomitant changes in the vegetation. While 23 years of differential snow depth and persistence fundamentally changed the vegetation composition, the...

Understanding the dynamics of socio‐ecological systems is crucial to the development of environmentally sustainable practices. Models of social or ecological sub‐systems have greatly enhanced such understanding, but at the risk of obscuring important feedbacks and emergent effects. Integrated modelling approaches have the potential to address this shortcoming by explicitly representing linked socio‐ecological dynamics. We developed a socio‐ecological system model by coupling an existing agent‐based model of land‐use dynamics and an individual‐based model of demography and...

Many species are undergoing distributional changes in response to climate change. However, wide variability in range shifting rates has been observed across taxa, and even among closely-related species. Attempts to link climate-mediated range shifts to traits has often produced weak or conflicting results. Here we investigate interactive effects of developmental processes and environmental stress on the expression of traits relevant to range shifts. We use an individual-based modelling approach to assess how different developmental strategies...