Volunteers have become more and more involved in monitoring the quality of the environment in which they live. Traditionally, water quality monitoring is the field of professionals at water authorities, however, community initiatives have been undertaken to monitor abiotic conditions in waterbodies. To date, biological water quality assessment based on data collected by volunteers remains scarce. A citizen science project on biological water quality assessment was launched in the Netherlands in 2018. In this project,...

Wind turbines and power lines can cause bird mortality due to collision or electrocution. The biodiversity impacts of energy infrastructure (EI) can be minimised through effective landscape-scale planning and mitigation. The identification of high-vulnerability areas is urgently needed to assess potential cumulative impacts of EI while supporting the transition to zero-carbon energy. We collected GPS location data from 1,454 birds from 27 species susceptible to collision within Europe and North Africa and identified areas where...

Plastic mulch film residues have been accumulating in agricultural soils for decades, but so far, little is known about its consequences on soil microbial communities and functions. Here, we tested the effects of plastic residues of low-density polyethylene and biodegradable mulch films on soil suppressiveness and microbial community composition. We investigated how plastic residues in a Fusarium culmorum suppressive soil affect the level of disease suppressiveness, plant biomass, nutrient status, and microbial communities in rhizosphere...

The dataset contains physical, chemical and biological measurements from the waters of 21 river sites across the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam. The data were collected monthly between February 2018 and January 2020. The parameters include temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, pH, turbidity, conductivity, total dissolved solids, dissolved nitrate, dissolved nitrite, dissolved ammonium, total nitrogen, dissolved phosphate, dissolved silicate, alkalinity, dissolved major ions (sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, chloride, sulphate) and a range of chlorophyll and...

Additional file 2: R documentation of data selection and chronotype estimations.

Waterbirds disperse plant species via ingestion and egestion of seeds (endozoochory). However, our understanding about the regulating effects of seed traits, underlying mechanisms and possible (co)evolutionary processes is limited by our traditional reliance on data from feeding experiments with living waterbirds. Here, we overcome these limitations by developing and applying a new bioassay that realistically simulates digestive processes for Anseriformes waterbirds. We test three hypotheses: (1) seed survival and germination are most affected by mechanical...

Sperm competition is thought to impose strong selection on males to produce competitive ejaculates to outcompete rival males under competitive mating conditions. Our understanding of how different sperm traits influence fertilization success, however, remains limited, especially in wild populations. Recent literature highlights the importance of incorporating multiple ejaculate traits and pre-copulatory sexually selected traits in analyses aimed at understanding how selection acts on sperm traits. However, variation in a male’s ability to gain fertilization success...

Functional tradeoffs among ecologically important traits govern the diversity of communities and changes in species composition along environmental gradients. A tradeoff between predator defense and resource competitive ability has been invoked as a mechanism that may maintain diversity in lake phytoplankton. Tradeoffs may promote diversity in communities where grazing- and resource-limited taxa coexist, which determines the extent to which communities are resource- or consumer-controlled. In addition, changes in temperature may alter nutrient demands and grazing...

The growth rate hypothesis (GRH), a central concept of ecological stoichiometry, posits that the relative body phosphorus content of an organism is positively related to somatic growth rate as protein synthesis, which is necessary for growth, requires P-rich rRNA and has strong support at the interspecific level. Here, we explore the use of the GRH to predict microevolutionary responses in consumer body stoichiometry. For this, we subjected zooplankton populations to selection for fast population growth...

The assembly of root-associated microbes during the seedling stage has strong impact on subsequent performance of crops. Major factors influencing this assembly are crop species identity and composition of potential root-colonizing microbes in the bulk soil. The latter can be modified by soil management, such as organic amendments. The incorporation of residues of cover crops before the start of the growing season of cash crops presents an interesting option for steering of root-associated seedling microbiomes...

Additional file 2: R documentation of data selection and chronotype estimations.

1. The concept of the opportunity for selection (I), measured as the variance in relative fitness, is over 60 years old, yet remains poorly understood by, or even unknown to, many ecologists and evolutionary biologists. This essay aims to clarify key conceptual and practical issues concerning use and estimation of I, which represents a theoretical upper limit on the rate of evolutionary adaptation. 2. The component of I caused by linear selection on a single...

Application of nitrogen fertilizers to reach high crop production is common practice. However, this can come with an environmental cost, irrespectively of the synthetic or organic origin of the nitrogen fertilizer. Intensively managed soils often fail to retain excess nitrogen, which leads to contamination of ground- and surface water. Next to abiotic factors like soil texture, limited nitrogen retention is ascribed to low activity of saprotrophic fungi. It has been shown that amendment of arable...

The study "Population size mediates the contribution of high-rate and large-benefit mutations to parallel evolution" by Schenk et al. explores the phenotypic and genotypic changes in Escherichia coli after 500 generations of laboratory adaptation to increasing concentrations of an antibiotic (CTX). The source data files and scripts pertaining to the figures in the main manuscript and the extended data are available on the publishers webiste. Here we provide the source data files and scripts pertaining...

We model growth of a density-dependent stage-structured population undergoing small or moderate fluctuations around a deterministically stable equilibrium in a stochastic environment, assuming that a weighted sum of stage abundances, N, exerts density dependence on the stage-specific vital rates of survival and reproduction. We approximate the dynamics of N as a onedimensional stochastic process with three key parameters: the density-independent growth rate and the net density dependence and environmental variance in the life history. Comparisons...

Purpose Insect herbivory affects plant growth, nutrient and secondary metabolite concentrations and litter quality. Changes to litter quality due to insect herbivory can alter decomposition, with knock on effects for plant growth mediated through the plantlitter- soil feedback pathway. Methods Using a multi-phase glasshouse experiment, we tested how changes in shoot and root litter quality of fast- and slow-growing grass caused by insect herbivores affect the performance of response plants in the soil in which...

Additional file 3: R documentation of changepoint functions.

The invasion of a novel host species can create a mismatch in host choice and offspring survival (performance) when native parasitoids attempt to exploit the invasive host without being able to circumvent its resistance mechanisms. Invasive hosts can therefore act as evolutionary trap reducing parasitoids’ fitness and this may eventually lead to their extinction. Yet, escape from the trap can occur when parasitoids evolve behavioural avoidance or a physiological strategy compatible with the trap host,...

We steered the soil microbiome via applications of organic residues (mix of cover crop residues, sewage sludge + compost, and digestate + compost) to enhance multiple ecosystem services in line with climate-smart agriculture. Our result highlights the potential to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from agricultural soils by the application of specific organic amendments (especially digestate + compost). Unexpectedly, also the addition of mineral fertilizer in our mesocosms led to similar combined GHG emissions than...

Parasitoids lay their eggs in or on a host, usually another insect. During foraging, parasitoids can encounter insects that differ in terms of host suitability and quality. At one extreme end of this spectrum are non-hosts that are unsuitable for offspring development. Non-hosts are generally ignored but parasitization does occur and occasionally also results in egg deposition. Here, we investigate how oviposition in a non-host influences subsequent foraging behaviour of a parasitoid and whether this...

One of the great challenges in biogeochemical research over the past half a century has been to quantify and understand the mechanisms underlying stable carbon isotope fractionation (εp) in phytoplankton in response to changing CO2 concentrations. Partly, this interest is grounded in the use of fossil photosynthetic organism remains as a proxy for past atmospheric CO2 levels. Phytoplankton organic carbon is depleted in 13C compared to its source because of kinetic fractionation by the enzyme...

Soils contain biotic and abiotic legacies of previous conditions that may influence plant community biomass and associated aboveground biodiversity. However, little is known about the relative strengths and interactions of the various belowground legacies on aboveground plant-insect interactions. We used an outdoor mesocosm experiment to investigate the belowground legacy effects of range-expanding versus native plants, extreme drought, and their interactions on plants, aphids, and pollinators. We show that plant biomass was influenced more strongly by...

Primary consumers in aquatic ecosystems are frequently limited by the quality of their food, often expressed as phytoplankton elemental and biochemical composition. However, effects of these food quality indicators vary across studies, and we lack an integrated understanding of how elemental (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus) and biochemical (e.g., fatty acid, sterol) limitations interactively influence aquatic food webs. Here we present results of a meta-analysis using >100 experimental studies, confirming that limitation by N, P, fatty acids,...

Additional file 3: R documentation of changepoint functions.

The use of biologging and tracking devices is widespread in avian behavioural and ecological studies. Carrying these devices rarely has major behavioural or fitness effects in the wild, yet it may still impact animals in more subtle ways, such as during high power demanding escape manoeuvres. Here, we tested whether or not great tits (Parus major) carrying a backpack radio-tag changed their body-mass or flight behaviour over time to compensate for the detrimental effect of...