1. Natural selection is the major force driving adaptive evolution in natural populations, varying in strength, direction, and form through space and time, especially in highly variable environments such as Mediterranean ecosystems. Although a conservative resource-use strategy has been hypothesized to be adaptive in Mediterranean taxa, patterns of selection at the intraspecific level, i.e., the suite of traits determining individual fitness, are largely unknown. 2. Using a phenotypic selection experiment in natural semiarid conditions, we...

Apex predators play key roles in food webs and their recovery can trigger trophic cascades in some ecosystems. Intra-guild competition can reduce the abundances of smaller predators and perceived predation risk can alter their foraging behaviour thereby limiting seed dispersal by frugivorous carnivores. However, little is known about how plant-frugivore mutualism could be disturbed in the presence of larger predators. We evaluated the top-down effect of the regional superpredator, the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), on...

Switching plant species visited by pollinators (partner flexibility), has been proposed as a behavioural mechanism able to attenuate the negative impacts of shifts in plant communities on pollination. However, it is unclear if the magnitude of such response is generalizable or depends on the environmental context. Moreover, the ability of pollinators to exploit plants with dissimilar traits (trait flexibility) has been overlooked, even though it can affect the spectrum of new partners available. To shed...

Phenotypic plasticity is a key mechanism by which plants respond to changing or heterogeneous conditions. Efforts to predict phenotypic plasticity across plant species have mainly focused on environmental variability or abiotic conditions, i.e., site characteristics. However, the considerable variation in phenotypic plasticity within sites calls for alternative approaches. Different functional groups are thought to differ in their plasticity levels. Further, traits such as leaf specific area (SLA), leaf area (LA) and maximum photosynthetic rate (Amax)...

The role of conspecific density dependence (CDD) in the maintenance of species richness is a central focus of tropical forest ecology. However, tests of CDD often ignore the integrated effects of CDD over multiple life-stages and their long-term impacts on population demography. We combined a 10-year time series of seed production, seedling recruitment and sapling and tree demography of three dominant Southeast Asian tree species that adopt a mast fruiting phenology. We used these data...

Parasitism is a key factor in the population dynamics of many herbivorous insects, although its impact on host populations varies widely, for instance, along latitudinal and altitudinal gradients. Understanding the sources of geographical variation in host-parasitoid interactions is crucial for reliably predicting the future success of the interacting species under a context of global change. Here, we examine larval parasitism in the butterfly Aglais urticae in south-west Europe, where it is a mountain specialist. Larval...

Optimal life-history theory predicts that individuals should adjust both the number and the sex of their offspring to maximize fitness in response to environmental and social factors such as breeding density. While reductions in optimal clutch size are well-studied in birds, the evidence for sex ratio adjustments is still equivocal and, so far, we lack a thorough understanding of how these strategies interact to maximize fitness. Here, we investigate how breeding density simultaneously affects brood...

This dataset includes values of 15 traits (total dry mass; root length to shoot length ratio; leaf mass fraction; root mass fraction; shoot mass fraction; leaf thickness; leaf force to punch; leaf area to shoot area ratio; leaf concentrations of N, P, K, Ca and Mg; leaf N: P concentration ratio; specific maximum root length) measured in February 2020 on 394 seedlings of 15 woody plant species growing in logged in the Ulu Segama Forest...

This dataset includes records of counts at four censuses between September 2019 and February 2021 of the number of seedlings of woody plants identified to species (or morphospecies) on a total of 207 plots located in either logged forest in the Ulu Segama Forest Reserve or unlogged forest in the Danum Valley Conservation Area, Malaysia. These data were collected as part of NERC project “Seeing the fruit for the trees in Borneo: responding to an...

Data used for the study entitled "Range-edge populations of seaweeds show niche unfilling and poor adaptation to increased temperatures". These are the distribution data collected from literature and personal communications to complete the GBIF and OBIS distributional records of the Atlantic European coast, the weekly growth data taken from the study individuals as well as the binomial survival data used for the graphs of the last week of the experiment.

Aim: The latitudinal gradient is considered a first-order biogeographical pattern for most taxonomic groups. Yet, latitudinal changes in plant ecological communities are not always consistent, and this could be related to the physical and biological characteristics of different forest types. In this study, we compare latitudinal changes in floristic diversity (alpha diversity), composition (beta diversity), and dominance across different tropical forest types: floodplain, terra firme, and submontane forests. Location: Western Amazonia (Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia)....