1.Land-use change is known to affect biodiversity, and there is increasing concern regarding how these changes may impact the provision of ecosystem services. Although functional composition (diversity and identity) could influence ecosystem properties and services at the community level, there is little quantitative understanding of these relationships in the field. Here, we evaluate the direct and indirect effects (through ecosystem properties) of biodiversity on the provision of multiple ecosystem services in native mixed forest in...

Respiratory disease has caused significant mortality in African great ape populations. While much effort has been given to identifying the responsible pathogens, little is known about the factors that influence disease transmission or individual susceptibility. In the Kanyawara community of wild chimpanzees, respiratory illness has been the leading cause of mortality over 30 years, contributing to 27% of deaths. Deaths were common in all age groups except juveniles. Over 22 years of health observations, respiratory...

1. A key challenge facing ecologists and ecosystem managers is understanding what drives unexpected shifts in ecosystems and limits the effectiveness of human interventions during these events. Research that integrates and analyzes data from natural and social systems can provide important insight for unraveling the complexity of these dynamics, and is a critical step towards development of evidence-based, whole systems management approaches. 2. To examine our ability to influence ecosystems that are behaving in unexpected...

The neural mechanisms regulating social behaviour have received extensive attention in recent years, with much focus on 'complex' forms of sociality. Comparatively little research has addressed fundamental social behaviour, such as grouping, which impacts multiple determinants of fitness, such as foraging and avoiding predation. We are interested in the degree to which brain areas that regulate other forms of sociality are also involved in grouping behaviour, and so we investigated shoal-elicited activation of the brain...

Wild bees, which are important for commercial pollination, depend on floral and nesting resources both at farms and in the surrounding landscape. Mass-flowering crops are only in bloom for a few weeks and unable to support bee populations that persist throughout the year. Farm fields and orchards that flower in succession potentially can extend the availability of floral resources for pollinators. However, it is unclear whether the same bee species or genera will forage from...

We examined how Arctic spider (Araneae) biodiversity is distributed at multiple spatial scales in Northern Canada using a standardized hierarchical sampling design. We investigated which drivers, environmental or spatial, influence the patterns observed. Spatial patterns of species richness and composition of Arctic spiders were assessed in 12 sites located in Arctic, Subarctic, and North-Boreal regions, across 30 degrees of latitude and 80 degrees of longitude. Variation of diversity was partitioned in relation to multiple environmental...

The gold standard for a definitive diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the pathologic finding of aggregated alpha-synuclein into Lewy bodies and for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) aggregated amyloid into plaques and hyperphosphorylated tau into tangles. Implicit in this clinico-pathologic-based nosology is the assumption that pathological protein aggregation at autopsy reflect pathogenesis at disease onset. While these aggregates may in exceptional cases be on a causal pathway in humans (e.g., aggregated alpha-synuclein in SNCA gene multiplication...

1. In ectotherms, anthropogenic warming often increases energy requirements for metabolism, which can either impair growth (when resources are limiting) or lead to higher predator feeding rates and possibly stronger top-down trophic interactions. However, the relative importance of these effects in nature remains unclear because: 1) thermal adaptation or acclimation could lower metabolic costs; 2) greater prey production at warmer temperatures could compensate for higher predator feeding rates; and/or 3) temperature effects on trophic interactions...

The evolutionary consequences of temporal variation in selection remain hotly debated. We explored these consequences by studying threespine stickleback in a set of bar-built estuaries along the central California coast. In most years, heavy rains induce water flow strong enough to break through isolating sand bars, connecting streams to the ocean. New sand bars typically re-form within a few weeks or months, thereby re-isolating populations within the estuaries. These breaching events cause severe and often...

Many important behaviours are socially learned. For example, the acoustic structure of courtship songs in songbirds is learned by listening to and interacting with conspecifics during a sensitive period in development. Signalers modify the spectral and temporal structures of their vocalizations depending on the social context, but the degree to which this modulation requires imitative social learning remains unknown. We found that zebra finches that were not exposed to context-dependent song modulations throughout development significantly...

Plant and fungal specimens in herbaria are becoming primary resources for investigating how plant phenology and geographic distributions shift with climate change, greatly expanding inferences across spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic dimensions. However, these specimens contain a wealth of additional data—including nutrients, defensive compounds, herbivore damage, disease lesions, and signatures of physiological processes—that capture ecological and evolutionary responses to the Anthropocene but which are less frequently utilized. Here, we outline the diversity of herbarium data, global...

Living in permanent social groups forces animals to make decisions about when, how and with whom to interact, requiring decisions to be made that integrate multiple sources of information. Changing social environments can influence this decision-making process by constraining choice or altering the likelihood of a positive outcome. Here, we conceptualised grooming as a choice situation where an individual chooses one of a number of potential partners. Studying two wild populations of sympatric primate species,...

Metabarcoding combines DNA barcoding with high-throughput sequencing, often using one genetic marker to understand complex and taxonomically diverse samples. However, species-level identification depends heavily on the choice of marker and the selected primer pair, often with a trade-off between successful species amplification and taxonomic resolution. We present a versatile metabarcoding protocol for biomonitoring that involves the use of two barcode markers (COI and 18S) and four primer pairs in a single high-throughput sequencing run, via...

Resource variation along abiotic gradients influences subsequent trophic interactions and these effects can be transmitted through entire food webs. Interactions along abiotic gradients can provide clues as to how organisms will face changing environmental conditions, such as future range shifts. However, it is challenging to find replicated systems to study these effects. Phytotelmata, such as those found in carnivorous plants, are isolated aquatic communities and thus form a good model for the study of replicated...

1. Robust predictions of predator-prey interactions are fundamental for the understanding of food webs, their structure, dynamics, resistance to species loss, response to invasions and ecosystem function. Most current food web models measure parameters at the food web level to predict patterns at the same level. Thus, they are sensitive to the quality of the data, and may be ineffective in predicting non-observed interactions and disturbed food webs. There is a need for mechanistic models...

Progress toward local adaptation is expected to be enhanced when divergent selection is multi-dimensional, because many simultaneous sources of selection can increase the total strength of selection and enhance the number of independent traits under selection. Yet, whether local adaptation ensues from multi-dimensional selection also depends on its potential to cause the build-up of reproductive barriers such as sexual signals and preference for these signals. We used replicate experimental introductions of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) in...

The behavior of many wild animals remains a mystery, as it is difficult to quantify behaviour of species that cannot be easily followed throughout their daily or seasonal movements. Accelerometers can solve some of these mysteries, as they collect activity data at a high temporal resolution (< 1 sec), can be relatively small (< 1 g) so they minimally disrupt behavior, and are increasingly capable of recording data for long periods. Nonetheless, there is a...

Studies of parallel or convergent evolution (the repeated, independent evolution of similar traits in similar habitats) rarely explicitly quantify the extent of parallelism (i.e., variation in the direction and/or magnitude of divergence) between the sexes; instead they often investigate both sexes together or exclude one sex. However, differences in male and female patterns of divergence could contribute to overall variation in the extent of parallelism among ecotype pairs, especially in sexually dimorphic traits. Failing to...

Effective communication among sympatric species is often instrumental for behavioural isolation, where the failure to successfully discriminate between potential mates could lead to less fit hybrid offspring. Discrimination between con- and heterospecifics tends to occur more often in the sex that invests more in offspring production, i.e. females, but males may also mediate reproductive isolation. In this study, we show that among two Campylomormyrus African weakly electric fish species, males preferentially associate with conspecific females...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide an opportunity to rapidly census wildlife in remote areas while removing some of the hazards. However, wildlife may respond negatively to the UAVs, thereby skewing counts. We surveyed four species of Arctic cliff-nesting seabirds (glaucous gull Larus hyperboreus, Iceland gull Larus glaucoides, common murre Uria aalge and thick-billed murre Uria lomvia) using a UAV and compared censusing techniques to ground photography. An average of 8.5% of murres flew off in...

Phylogenetic imputation has recently emerged as a potentially powerful tool for predicting missing data in functional traits datasets. As such, understanding the limitations of phylogenetic modelling in predicting trait values is critical if we are to use them in subsequent analyses. Previous studies have focused on the relationship between phylogenetic signal and clade-level prediction accuracy, yet variability in prediction accuracy among individual tips of phylogenies remains largely unexplored. Here, we used simulations of trait evolution...

Defended prey often use distinctive, conspicuous, colours to advertise their unprofitability to potential predators (aposematism). These warning signals are frequently made up of salient, high contrast, stripes which have been hypothesised to increase the speed and accuracy of predator avoidance learning. Limitations in predator visual acuity, however, mean that these patterns cannot be resolved when viewed from a distance, and adjacent patches of colour will blend together (pattern blending). We investigated how saliency changes at...

Understanding the extent to which captivity generates maladaptation in wild species can inform species recovery programs and elucidate wild population responses to novel environmental change. Though rarely quantified, effective population size (Ne) and genetic diversity should influence the magnitude of plastic and genetic changes manifested in captivity that reduce wild fitness. Sexually-dimorphic traits might also mediate consequences of captivity. To evaluate these relationships, we generated >600 full- and half-sibling families from nine wild brook trout...

Although connectivity can promote host species persistence in a metapopulation, dispersal may also enable disease transmission, an effect further complicated by the impact that parasite distribution may have on host-parasite population dynamics. We investigated the effects of connectivity and initial parasite distribution (clustered or dispersed) on microparasite-host dynamics in experimental metapopulations, using guppies and Gyrodactylus turnbulli. We created metapopulations of guppies divided into four subpopulations and introduced either a low level of parasites to all...

Systematically quantifying diversity across landscapes is necessary to understand how clade history and ecological heterogeneity contribute to the origin, distribution, and maintenance of biodiversity. Here, we chart the spatial structure of diversity among all species in the sedge family (Cyperaceae) throughout the USA and Canada. We first identify areas of remarkable species richness, phylogenetic diversity, and functional trait diversity, and highlight regions of conservation priority. We then test predictions about the spatial structure of this...