For ecosystem models to be applicable outside their context of development, temporal and spatial transferability must be demonstrated. This presents a challenge for modeling intertidal ecosystems where spatiotemporal variation arises at multiple scales. Models specializing in tidal dynamics are generally inhibited from having wider ecological applications by coarse spatiotemporal resolution or high user competency. The Tidal Inundation Model of Shallow-water Availability (TiMSA) uniquely simulates tides to empirically derive a time-integrated measure of availability for a...

Climate change is causing global shifts in phenology, altering when and how species respond to environmental cues such as temperature and the timing of snowmelt. These shifts may result in phenological mismatches among interacting species, creating cascading effects on community and ecosystem dynamics. Using passive warming structures and snow removal, we examined how experimentally increased temperatures, earlier spring snowmelt, and the poorly understood interaction between warming and earlier spring snowmelt affected flower onset, flowering duration,...

Aim: Extensive portions of high-latitude grasslands worldwide have recently experienced increased vegetative productivity (i.e., greening) and have undergone a rapid transition towards woody plant dominance via the process of woody plant expansion (WPE). This raises the underlying question: To what degree are WPE and greening spatiotemporally linked? Given that these vegetative changes are predicted to continue, we seek to understand how recent changes in vegetation extent and productivity have interacted under recent climate change and...

Understanding how the Earth's surface (i.e., ‘nature’s stage’) influences connections between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) is a central objective in ecology. Despite recent calls to examine these connections at multiple trophic levels and at more complex and realistic scales, little is known about how landscape structure shapes BEF relationships among animal communities in nature. We coupled high-resolution habitat mapping with extensive field sampling to quantify connections among the geophysical habitat templet, invertebrate assemblages, and...

Beaver-dam-mimicry is an emergent conservation practice. We evaluated the influence of constructed riffles, a unique type of beaver mimicry aimed to store water and allow fish passage, on habitat for fishes in one control reach and one manipulated reach with mimicry structures added. The beaver mimicry reach had deeper pool habitats and deeper and wider riffle habitats compared to an unmanipulated control reach. Dissolved oxygen was similar among reaches, averaging 8.7 ± 0.2 and 8.9...

Premise. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can strongly influence host plant vegetative growth, but less is known about AMF effects on other plant traits, the relative impacts of AMF on vegetative growth versus floral traits, or AMF-induced intraspecific variation in traits. Key results. AMF species varied in their effects on host plants, from negative to positive effects. AMF often had inconsistent effects on vegetative biomass versus floral traits, and therefore quantifying one or the other may...

Megachile rotundata (F.) is an important pollinator of alfalfa in the United States. Enhancing landscapes with wildflowers is a primary strategy for conserving pollinators and may improve sustainability of M. rotundata. Changing cold storage temperatures from a traditionally static thermal regime (STR) to a fluctuating thermal regime (FTR) improves overwintering success and extends M. rotundata’s shelf life and pollination window. Whether floral resources enhance overwintering survival and/or interact with thermal regime are unknown. With these...

The black flying fox (Pteropus alecto) is a natural reservoir for Hendra virus, a paramyxovirus that causes fatal infections in humans and horses in Australia. Increased excretion of Hendra virus by flying foxes has been hypothesized to be associated with physiological or energetic stress in the reservoir hosts. The objective of this study was to explore the leukocyte profiles of wild-caught P. alecto, with a focus on describing the morphology of each cell type to...

Diet plasticity is a common behavior exhibited by piscivores to sustain predator biomass when preferred prey biomass is reduced. Invasive piscivore diet plasticity could complicate suppression success; thus, understanding invasive predator consumption is insightful to meeting conservation targets. Here, we determine if diet plasticity exists in an invasive apex piscivore and how plasticity could influence native species recovery benchmarks and invasive species suppression goals. We compared diet and stable isotope signatures of invasive lake trout...

1. Ecosystem engineers strongly influence the communities in which they live by modifying habitats and altering resource availability. These biogenic changes can persist beyond the presence of the engineer, and such modifications are known as ecosystem engineering legacy effects. 2. Although many authors recognize ecosystem engineering legacies, and some case studies quantify the effects of legacies, few general frameworks describe their causes and consequences across species or ecosystem types. 3. Here, we synthesize evidence for...

Human impacts, particularly nutrient pollution and land-use change, have caused significant declines in the quality and quantity of freshwater resources. Most global assessments have concentrated on species diversity and composition, but effects on the multifunctionality of streams and rivers remain unclear. Here, we analyse the most comprehensive compilation of stream ecosystem functions to date to provide an overview of the responses of nutrient uptake, leaf litter decomposition, ecosystem productivity, and food web complexity to six...

Data used in Ranglack et al. (in review), Modeling broad-scale patterns of elk summer resource selection in Montana using regional and population-specific models. Understanding animal distribution is important for the management of populations and their habitats. Across the western United States, elk (Cervus canadensis) provide important ecological, cultural, and economic benefits and the sound management of their habitats is of vital importance. In western Montana, National Forest lands are managed in part to provide and...

Predators can impact prey via predation or risk effects, which can initiate trophic cascades. Given widespread population declines of apex predators, understanding and predicting the associated ecological consequences is a priority. When predation risk is relatively unpredictable or uncontrollable by prey, the loss of predators is hypothesized to release prey from stress; however, there are few tests of this hypothesis in the wild. A well-studied predator-prey system between white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) and Cape fur...

High elevation grasslands provide critical services in agriculture and ecosystem stabilization. However, these ecosystems face elevated risks of disturbance due to predicted soil and climate changes. We experimentally exposed model grassland communities, comprised of three species grown on either local or reference soil, to varied climatic environments along an elevational gradient in the European Alps, measuring the effects on species and community traits. Although species-specific biomass varied across soil and climate, species’ proportional contributions to...

Spatial variation in species interactions (interaction β-diversity) and its ecological drivers are poorly understood, despite their relevance to community assembly, conservation, and ecosystem functioning. We investigated effects of wildfire severity on patterns and four proximate ecological drivers of interaction β-diversity in plant-bee communities across three localities in the Northern Rocky Mountains (Montana, USA). Wildfires decreased interaction β-diversity but increased interaction frequency (number of visits) and richness (number of links). After controlling for interaction frequency and...

Moose are among the many species that are vulnerable to both direcdt and indirect effects of climate change. Habitat selection is one framework to assist investigators in disentangling the various factors (including weather) that ultimately dictate how animals respond to their environment. We investigated patterns of winter habitat selecdtion by adult female moose in southerwestern MOntana, USA, during 2007-2010, and how that selection was affected by snow (quantified by snow water equivalent) and winter temperatures....

Patterns of food quality and availability, when combined with energetic demands in seasonal environments, shape resource acquisition and allocation by animals and hold consequences for life-history strategies. In long-lived species with extensive maternal care, regulation of somatic reserves of energy and protein can occur in a risk-sensitive manner, wherein resources are preferentially allocated to support survival at the cost of investment in reproduction. We investigated how Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis), an alpine mammal...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends against washing raw chicken due to the risk of transferring dangerous food-borne pathogens through splashed drops of water. Many cooks continue to wash raw chicken despite this warning, however, and there is a lack of scientific research assessing the extent of microbial transmission in splashed droplets. Here we use large agar plates to confirm that bacteria can be transferred from the surface of raw chicken through splashing. We...

The ecological conditions experienced by wildlife reservoirs affect infection dynamics and thus the distribution of pathogen excreted into the environment, which have been hypothesized to shape risks of zoonotic spillover. However, few systems have data on both long-term ecological conditions and pathogen excretion to advance mechanistic understanding and test environmental drivers of spillover risk. We here analyze three years of Hendra virus data from nine Australian flying fox roosts with covariates derived from long-term studies...