1. Dryland communities may mitigate the loss of limited resources by exchanging nutrients through subterranean fungal connections, termed fungal loops. In arid grasslands, fungal loops can influence community composition and primary productivity, yet their ecological significance across dryland systems remains unexplored. We investigated the functional role of fungal loops in nutrient translocation in a North American shrubland ecosystem. 2. We traced the movement of 15N from moss-dominated biocrusts to the dominant xeric shrub Larrea tridentata,...

Symbiotic nitrogen (N)‐fixing trees can provide large quantities of new N to ecosystems, but only if they are sufficiently abundant. The overall abundance and latitudinal abundance distributions of N‐fixing trees are well characterised in the Americas, but less well outside the Americas. Here, we characterised the abundance of N‐fixing trees in a network of forest plots spanning five continents, ~5,000 tree species and ~4 million trees. The majority of the plots (86%) were in America...

Biologists recognize the Caribbean archipelago as a biodiversity hotspot and employ it for their research as a “natural laboratory”, but do not always appreciate that these ecosystems are in fact palimpsests shaped by multiple human cultures over millennia. We discuss two case studies of the Caribbean’s fragmented natural history collections, the effects of differing legislation and governance by the region’s multiple nation states. We use digital natural history specimen data from GBIF to demonstrate how...

1. In capture-recapture studies, recycled individuals occur when individuals lose all of their tags and are recaptured as though they were new individuals. Typically, the effect of these recycled individuals is assumed negligible. 2. Through a simulation-based study of double tagging experiments, we examined the effect of recycled individuals on parameter estimates in the Jolly-Seber model with tag loss (Cowen & Schwarz, 2006). We validated the simulation framework using long-term census data of elephant seals....

Biodiversity describes the variety of life and may influence properties and processes of ecosystems, such as biomass production and resistance to disturbance. We investigated the effects of multiple facets of biodiversity – species richness and composition of the community, and intraspecific diversity in two key species – on both production and resistance of experimentally-assembled biological soil crusts (biocrusts). We found that productivity was most strongly influenced by community composition (variation in the presence and relative...

Additional file 1. Table S1. COVID-Specific Items and Scales. Table S2. Descriptive Statistics of Person-Reported Outcomes. Table S3. Unadjusted Group Comparisons on Person-Reported Outcomes. Table S4. Representativeness Checks. Table S5. Distribution of Covariates in the Matched Samples. Table S6. Comparison of Explained Variance by Demographics and COVID-specific Variables in Whole-Sample vs. Matched Cohort Analyses.

Additional file 1. Table S1. COVID-Specific Items and Scales. Table S2. Descriptive Statistics of Person-Reported Outcomes. Table S3. Unadjusted Group Comparisons on Person-Reported Outcomes. Table S4. Representativeness Checks. Table S5. Distribution of Covariates in the Matched Samples. Table S6. Comparison of Explained Variance by Demographics and COVID-specific Variables in Whole-Sample vs. Matched Cohort Analyses.

This paper calculates the distribution of an adjusted measure of income that deducts damages due to exposure to air pollution from reported market income in the United States from 2011 to 2014. The Gini coefficient for this measure of adjusted income is 0.682 in 2011, as compared to 0.482 for market income. By 2014, we estimate that the Gini for adjusted income fell to 0.646, while the market income Gini did not appreciably change. The...

Combining samples for genetic association is standard practice in human genetic analysis of complex traits, but is rarely undertaken in rodent genetics. Here, using 23 phenotypes and genotypes from two independent laboratories, we obtained a sample size of 3,076 commercially available outbred mice and identified 70 loci, more than double the number of loci identified in the component studies. Fine-mapping in the combined sample reduced the number of likely causal variants, with a median reduction...