1. In recent years, the incorporation of lower levels of organization to the understanding of population ecology, has led to an increase in interest for animal personality and individual foraging specialization. Despite these topics investigating comparable phenomena, i.e. individual consistency in behavior and in food resource use respectively, they have rarely been investigated together. 2. Food resource use is thought to be at the interface between personality and life-history. More explorative individuals in a population,...

There are currently few predictions about when evolutionary processes are likely to play an important role in structuring community features.Determining predictors that indicate when evolution is expected to impact ecological processes in natural landscapes can help researchers identify eco-evolutionary 'hotspots', where eco-evolutionary interactions are more likely to occur. Using data collected from a survey in freshwater cladoceran communities, landscape population genetic data, and phenotypic trait data measured in a common garden, we applied a Bayesian...

Predicting how food webs will respond to global environmental change is difficult because of the complex interplay between the abiotic forcing and biotic interactions. Mechanistic models of species interactions in seasonal environments can help understand the effects of global change in different ecosystems. Seasonally ice-covered lakes are warming faster than many other ecosystems and undergoing pronounced food web changes, making the need to forecast those changes especially urgent. Using a seasonally forced food web model...

Local biodiversity patterns are expected to strongly reflect variation in topography, land use, dispersal boundaries, nutrient supplies, contaminant spread, management practices and other anthropogenic influences. In contrast, studies focusing on specific taxa revealed a biodiversity homogenization effect in areas subjected to long-term intensive industrial agriculture. We investigated whether land use affects biodiversity levels and community composition (α & β diversity) in 67 kettle holes (KH) representing small aquatic islands embedded in the patchwork matrix of...

Harvest of fish and wildlife, both commercial and recreational, is a selective force that can induce evolutionary changes to life-history and behaviour. Natural selective forces may create countering selection pressures. Assessing natural fitness represents a considerable challenge in broadcast spawners. Thus, our understanding of the relative strength of natural and fisheries selection is slim. In the field, we compared the strength and shape of harvest selection to natural selection on body size over four years...

Aim Understanding the variation in biodiversity and its underlying drivers and mechanisms is a core task in biogeography and ecology. We examined (a) the relative contributions of species replacement (i.e., turnover) and richness difference (i.e., nestedness) to taxonomically and trait-based β-diversity of stream benthic algae; (b) whether these two facets of β-diversity are correlated with each other; and (c) the relative contributions of local environmental, geo-climatic and spatial factors to the two facets of β-diversity...

Aquatic ecosystems are attractive sites for recreation. However, human presence at or on aquatic ecosystems can have a range of ecological impacts, creating trade-offs between recreation as ecosystem service and biodiversity conservation. There is currently no synthesis of evidence regarding the ecological impacts associated with various forms of aquatic recreation, to compare the magnitude of effects between types of recreation. Therefore, conservation conflicts surrounding water-based recreation are difficult to manage. We conducted a global meta-analysis,...

1. Global warming challenges the persistence of local populations, not only through heat-induced stress, but also through indirect biotic changes. We study the interactive effects of temperature, competition and parasitism in the water flea Daphnia magna. 2. We carried out a common garden experiment monitoring the dynamics of Daphnia populations along a temperature gradient. Halfway through the experiment, all populations became infected with the ectoparasite Amoebidium parasiticum, enabling us to study interactive effects of temperature...

Changes in land use and agricultural intensification threaten biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of small water bodies. We studied 67 kettle holes (KH) in an agricultural landscape in northeastern Germany using landscape-scale metatranscriptomics, to understand the responses of active bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic communities, to land-use type. These KH are proxies of the millions of small standing water bodies of glacial origin spread across the northern hemisphere. Like other landscapes in Europe, the study area has...

Species react to environmental change via plastic and evolutionary responses. While both of them determine species’ survival, most studies quantify these responses only individually. As species occur in communities, competing species may further influence their respective response to environmental change. Yet, how environmental change and competing species combined shape plastic and genetic responses to environmental change remains unclear. Quantifying how species interactions such as competition alter plastic and genetic responses of species to environmental change...

Many plant and algal communities respond to warming with shifts towards more carbon-rich species and growth forms, thus diluting essential elements in their biomass and intensifying the stoichiometric mismatch with herbivore nutrient requirements. The dataset is from a 95-day mesocosm experiment on the spring succession of an assembled plankton community in which we manipulated temperature (ambient vs. +3.6°C) and presence vs. absence of two types of grazers (ciliates and Daphnia) in a 2x2x2 factorial design...

1. Multiple stressors such as climate change and eutrophication are responsible for the global decline of macrophytes in lakes. The loss of this key component can result in turbid conditions and a loss of important ecosystem functions and services, particularly in shallow lakes. Benthivorous fish, which can increase in abundance during eutrophication, can adversely affect macrophytes through physical disturbance, cascading effects on turbidity, suspended and attached algae (phytoplankton and periphyton) and direct consumption. However, whether...

This dataset contains data from field collections described in the paper: “Shields, R., Pyron, M., Arsenault, E., Thorp, J., Minder, M., Artz, C., Costello, J., Otgonganbat, A., Mendsaikhan, B., Maasri., A. (2022) Geomorphology variables predict fish assemblages for forested and endorheic rivers. Ecology and Evolution. ECE-2021-08-01367”. Stream fishes are restricted to specific environments with appropriate habitats for feeding and reproduction. Interactions between streams and surrounding landscapes influence the availability and type of fish habitat, nutrient...

The dataset lists the diploid read lengths for nine microsatellites of 655 individuals of Coregonus fishes (Baltic and Siberian ciscoes, C. albula, C. fontanae, C. lucinensis, C. sardinella plus one C. maraena population) from 18 populations in Germany, Sweden, Finland, Poland and Russia. The nine microsatellites are BWF1, BWF2, Cisco126, Cisco157, Cisco90, Cocl23, Sfo23, Sfo8, Str73.

This dataset contains data from from a mesocom experiment with larval fish as described in the paper: "Huss, M., van Dorst, R.M., and Gårdmark, A. (2021) Larval fish body growth responses to simultaneous browning and warming" The data comes from a fully factorial experiment of warming and browning in pelagic mesocosms in two adjacent areas in the Baltic Sea archipelago; an artificially heated coastal bay and a natural area with ambient temperatures. To answer the...

Bird predation poses a strong selection pressure on fish. Since birds must enter the water to catch fish, a combination of visual and mechano-acoustic cues (multimodal) characterize an immediate attack, while single cues (unimodal) may represent less dangerous disturbances. We investigated whether fish could use this information to distinguish between non-threatening and dangerous events and adjust their anti-predator response to the perceived level of risk. To do so, we investigated the anti-predator behavior of the...

Species delimitation is fundamental to deciphering the mechanisms that generate and maintain biodiversity. Alpha taxonomy historically relied on expert knowledge to describe new species using phenotypic and biogeographic evidence, which has the appearance of investigator subjectivity. In contrast, DNA‐based methods using the multispecies coalescent model (MSC) promise a more objective approach to describing biodiversity. However, recent criticisms suggest that under some conditions the MSC may over‐split lineages, identifying species that do not reflect biological reality....