Over the past decades, tropical forests have experienced both compositional and structural changes. In the Neotropics, researchers at multiple sites have observed significant increases in the abundance and biomass of lianas (i.e. woody vines) relative to trees. However, the role of dynamics at early life stages in contributing to increasing liana abundance remains unclear. We took advantage of a unique dataset on seedling dynamics over 16 years in ~20,000 1-m2plots in a tropical forest in...

Big, time-scaled phylogenies are fundamental to connecting evolutionary processes to modern biodiversity patterns. Yet inferring reliable phylogenetic trees for thousands of species involves numerous trade-offs that have limited their utility to comparative biologists. To establish a robust evolutionary timescale for all ~6000 living species of mammals, we developed credible sets of trees that capture root-to-tip uncertainty in topology and divergence times. Our ‘backbone-and-patch’ approach to tree-building applies a newly assembled 31-gene supermatrix to two levels...

Trophic rewilding seeks to rehabilitate degraded ecosystems by repopulating them with large animals, thereby reestablishing strong top-down interactions. Yet there are vanishingly few tests of whether such initiatives can restore ecosystem structure and functions, and on what timescales. Here we show that war-induced collapse of large-mammal populations in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park exacerbated woody encroachment by the invasive shrub Mimosa pigra—one of the world’s ‘100 worst’ invasive species—and that one decade of concerted trophic rewilding...

Additional file 6: Figure S1. The representative MS/MS spectrum of LTGMAFR, supporting both B. glabrata and S. mansoni glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (G3PDH).

Abstract Background Schistosomiasis is a harmful neglected tropical disease caused by infection with Schistosoma spp., such as Schistosoma mansoni. Schistosoma must transition within a molluscan host to survive. Chemical analyses of schistosome-molluscan interactions indicate that host identification involves chemosensation, including naïve host preference. Proteomic technique advances enable sophisticated comparative analyses between infected and naïve snail host proteins. This study aimed to compare resistant, susceptible and naïve Biomphalaria glabrata snail-conditioned water (SCW) to identify potential attractants...

Additional file 8: Table S5. A list of the total proteins, unique proteins and corresponding peptides identified in susceptible B. glabrata SCW with reference to the S. mansoni proteome, and enriched GO terms related to the proteins.

Additional file 1: Database S1. The B. glabrata protein database used in the proteomic data analysis.

1. Invasive plant effects on litter decomposition tend to be idiosyncratic among species and ecosystems, which may arise from variation in the invader’s relative abundance (mass ratio effect), its relative functional difference to other species (trait divergence effect), and/or from species’ litter mixing that causes non-additive decomposition rates relative to single-species decomposition. 2. We use experimental microcosms to quantify the potential for mass ratio and trait divergence to explain effects of invasive litters on carbon...

Additional file 10: Figure S3. The co-expression levels of S. mansoni proteins identified.

Additional file 3: Table S2. A list of the total proteins, unique proteins and corresponding peptides identified in naïve B. glabrata with reference to the B. glabrata proteome.

Additional file 3: Table S2. A list of the total proteins, unique proteins and corresponding peptides identified in naïve B. glabrata with reference to the B. glabrata proteome.

Additional file 7: Figure S2. The representative MS/MS of supporting peptides of S. mansoni protein identification.

1. Resource competition theory is a conceptual framework that provides mechanistic insights into competition and community assembly of species with different resource requirements. However, there has been little exploration of how resource requirements depend on other environmental factors, including temperature. Changes in resource requirements as influenced by environmental temperature would imply that climate warming can alter the outcomes of competition and community assembly. 2. We experimentally demonstrate that environmental temperature alters the minimum light and...

Male peacock spiders (Maratus, Salticidae) compete to attract female mates using elaborate, sexually-selected displays. They evolved both brilliant color and velvety black. Here we use scanning electron microscopy (SEM), hyperspectral imaging, and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) optical modeling to investigate the deep black surfaces of peacock spiders. We found that super black regions reflect <0.5% of light (for a 30° collection angle) in Maratus speciosus (0.44%) and Maratus karrie (0.35%) due to microscale structures. Both species...

The fish clade Pelagiaria, which includes tunas as its most famous members, evolved remarkable morphological and ecological variety in a setting not generally considered conducive to diversification: the open ocean. Relationships within Pelagiaria have proven elusive due to short internodes subtending major lineages suggestive of rapid early divergences. Using a novel sequence dataset of over 1000 ultraconserved DNA elements (UCEs) for 94 of the 286 species of Pelagiaria (more than 70% of genera), we provide...

Secondary contact may have important implications for ecological and evolutionary processes; however, few studies have tracked the outcomes of secondary contact from its onset in natural ecosystems. We evaluated an anadromous alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) reintroduction project in Rogers Lake (Connecticut, USA), which contains a landlocked alewife population that was isolated as a result of colonial era damming. After access to the ocean was restored, adult anadromous alewife were stocked into the lake. We assessed anadromous...

Supplemental material, Replication_code_annotated_JIV_final for Violence and Discrimination Against Men Who Have Sex With Men in Lebanon: The Role of International Displacement and Migration by Lilla Orr, Fatma M. Shebl, Robert Heimer, Kaveh Khoshnood, Russell Barbour, Danielle Khouri, Elie Aaraj, Jacques E. Mokhbat and Forrest W. Crawford in Journal of Interpersonal Violence

Elucidating whether PTSD symptoms predict poorer social connectedness over time (i.e. social erosion) and/or that poor social connectedness contributes to maintenance of PTSD (i.e. social causation) has implications for PTSD treatment and relapse prevention. Most extant research has been cross-sectional and examined overall PTSD symptoms. Evidence of longitudinal associations among heterogeneous PTSD symptom clusters and social connectedness could provide insight into more nuanced targets for intervention. Using data from 1,491 U.S. military veterans in residential...

Premise of the study: We take an integrative approach in assessing how introgression and Pleistocene climate fluctuations have shaped the diversification of the Viburnum lentago clade, a group of five inter-fertile species with broad areas of sympatry. We specifically tested whether flowering time plays a role in maintaining species isolation. Methods: RAD-seq data for 103 individuals were used to infer the species relationships and the genetic structure within each species. Flowering times were compared among...

Many studies have demonstrated the importance of early successional forest habitat for breeding bird abundance, composition, and diversity. However, very few studies directly link measures of bird diversity, composition and abundance to measures of forest composition and structure and their dynamic change over early succession. This study examines the relationships between breeding bird community composition and forest structure in regenerating broadleaf forests of southern New England, USA, separating the influences of ecological succession from retained...

Nitrogen additions are known to elicit variable responses in semi-arid ecosystems, with responses increasing with precipitation. The response of semi-arid ecosystems to nitrogen are important to understand due to their large spatial extent worldwide and the global trend of increasingly available nitrogen. In this study, we evaluated the impact of a single nitrogen addition pulse on a semi-arid big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) ecosystem in western Wyoming. This is important given that sagebrush ecosystems are poorly...

Reforestation is challenging when timber harvested areas have been degraded, invaded by non-native species, or are of marginal suitability to begin with. Conifers form mutualistic partnerships with ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) to obtain greater access to soil resources, and these partnerships may be especially important in degraded areas. However, timber harvest can impact mycorrhizal fungi by removing or compacting topsoil, removing host plants, and warming and drying the soil. We used a field experiment to evaluate...

The inability of species to adapt to changing climate may cause ecological communities to disassemble and lose ecological functioning. However, theory suggests that communities may be resilient whenever populations within species exhibit variation in thermal plasticity or adaptation whereby thermally tolerant populations replace thermally sensitive ones. But will they maintain the functional roles of the populations being replaced? This study evaluated whether “like replaces like” functionally by measuring how four populations of a grasshopper herbivore...

Additional file 1: Database S1. The B. glabrata protein database used in the proteomic data analysis.

Supplemental material, lebanon_supplement_final for Violence and Discrimination Against Men Who Have Sex With Men in Lebanon: The Role of International Displacement and Migration by Lilla Orr, Fatma M. Shebl, Robert Heimer, Kaveh Khoshnood, Russell Barbour, Danielle Khouri, Elie Aaraj, Jacques E. Mokhbat and Forrest W. Crawford in Journal of Interpersonal Violence