Aims: Tropical tree lines are often associated with abrupt shifts in vegetation, soils and disturbance regimes, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We analysed the role of grazing, fuels and fire in maintaining a sharp tree line with flammable heathland above non-flammable forest. Location: Bale Mountains, Ethiopia. Methods: Grazing exclosures, repeated vegetation sampling, soil analyses and burning and sowing experiments along an altitudinal gradient with Hagenia abyssinica forest, Erica trimera forest and Erica heathland;...

Rufiji tilapia (Oreochromis urolepis urolepis) is an endemic cichlid in Tanzania. In addition to its importance for biodiversity conservation, Rufiji tilapia is also attractive for farming due to its high growth-rate, salinity tolerance, and the production of all-male hybrids when crossed with Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus). The aim of the current study was to assess the genetic diversity and population structure of both wild and farmed Rufiji tilapia populations in order to inform conservation and...

Conflicts of interest between resource extraction and conservation are widespread, and negotiating such conflicts or trade-offs is a key issue for ecosystem managers. One such trade-off is resource competition between fisheries and marine top predators. Managing this trade-off has so far been difficult due to a lack of knowledge regarding the amount and distribution of prey required by top predators. Here, we develop a framework that can be used to address this gap: a bio-energetic...

Spectacular long-distance migration has evolved repeatedly in animals enabling exploration of resources separated in time and space. In birds, these patterns are largely driven by seasonality, cost of migration, and asymmetries in competition leading most often to leap-frog migration, where northern breeding populations winter furthest to the south. Here we show that the highly aerial common swift Apus apus, spending the non-breeding period on the wing, instead exhibits a rarely-found chain migration pattern, where the...

1. Assessing the source-sink status of populations and habitats is of major importance for understanding population dynamics and for the management of natural populations. Sources produce a net surplus of individuals (per capita contribution to the metapopulation >1) and will be the main contributors for self-sustaining populations, whereas sinks produce a deficit (contribution < 1). However, making these types of assessments is generally hindered by the problem of separating mortality from permanent emigration, especially when...

This is the data set used for the publication Buffering effects of soil seed banks on plant community composition in response to land use and climate, published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. Aim. Climate and land use are key determinants of biodiversity, with past and ongoing changes posing serious threats to global ecosystems. Unlike most other organism groups, plant species can possess dormant life-history stages such as soil seed banks, which may help...

Low-productivity forests are often the last remaining pristine forests in managed forest landscapes and typically overrepresented among protected forests. However, the provisioning of individual and multiple ecosystem services (ES-multifunctionality) by these forests remains poorly assessed, making it difficult to evaluate their importance in forest conservation and management. Using nationwide data on ecosystem services (ES) from forest plots, we test whether levels of ES-multifunctionality and individual ES differ between low-productivity forested mires and rocky outcrops in...

Tropical forests, which harbor high levels of biodiversity, are being lost at an alarming speed. Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot, has lost more than half of its original forest cover. Most of the remaining forests are small fragments of primary and secondary forest with differing degrees of human impact. These forests, as well as coffee and fruit plantations, may be important in supporting the forest dependent biodiversity in Madagascar but this has been little studied. In...

Resource dispersion or kin selection are commonly used to explain animal spatial and social organization. Despite this, studies examining how these factors interact in wild populations of solitary animals are rare. We used 16 years of individual-level spatial and genetic data to disentangle how resources and relatedness influence spatial organization of a solitary predator, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). As expected, space-use overlap between neighbouring individuals increased when food resources were heterogeneous and unpredictably distributed...

Rust fungi are obligate parasites of plants with complex and in many cases poorly known life cycles which may include host alteration and up to five spore types with haploid, diploid and dikaryotic nuclear stages. This study supports that Thekopasora areolata, the causal agent of cherry-spruce rust in Norway spruce, is a macrocyclic heteroecious fungus with all five spore stages which uses two host plants Prunus padus and Picea abies to complete its life cycle....

Insular ecosystems share analogous ecological conditions, leading to patterns of convergent evolution that are collectively termed the “island syndrome”. In birds, part of this syndrome is a tendency for a duller plumage, possibly as a result of relaxed sexual selection and the reduced need for species recognition. Despite this global pattern, some insular species display a more colourful plumage than their mainland relatives, but why this occurs has remained unexplained. Here, we examine the hypothesis...

Lepidium campestre (L.) or field cress is a multifaceted oilseed plant, which has not been domesticated yet. Moreover, the molecular and genetic mechanisms underlying the domestication traits of field cress remain largely elusive. The overarching goal is to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) that are fundamental for domestication of field cress. Mapping and dissecting quantitative trait variation may provide important insights into genomic trajectories underlying field cress domestication. We used 7624 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)...

Human infrastructure and disturbance play an important role when animals select resources in human-modified landscapes. Theory predicts that animals trade food intake against costs of movement or disturbance to optimize net energy gain and fitness, but other necessary resources may also constrain the decisions, e.g. when animals repeatedly need to return to a central location, such as a nest, waterhole or night roost. Central place foraging theory states that the probability of occurrence of an...

Changes in plant communities can have large effects on ecosystem carbon (C) dynamics and long-term C stocks. However, how these effects are mediated by environmental context or vary among ecosystems is not well understood. To study this, we used a long-term plant removal experiment set up across 30 forested lake islands in northern Sweden which collectively represent a strong gradient of soil fertility and ecosystem productivity. We measured forest floor CO2 exchange and aboveground and...

1. Species range limits are thought to result from a decline in demographic performance at range edges. However, recent studies reporting contradictory patterns in species demographic performance at their edges cast doubt on our ability to predict climate change demographic impacts. To understand these inconsistent demographic responses at the edges, we need to shift the focus from geographic to climatic edges and analyse how species responses vary with climatic constraints at the edge and species’...

Data on two offspring performance traits (seeds per capsule and flower number) in greenhouse studies of Collinsia heterophylla to investigate indirect benefits of mate choice. We performed two-donor pollinations during successive floral stages and with different competitor types (outcross and self) to assess how stigma receptivity and two pollen traits known to affect siring success influence offspring performance. We also investigated the link between seed production in mothers and offspring as an indication of heritability...

Abundant citizen science data on species occurrences is becoming increasingly available and enables identifying composition of communities occurring at multiple sites with high temporal resolution. However, for species displaying temporary patterns of local occurrences, i.e. that are transient to some sites, biodiversity measures are clearly dependent on the criteria used to include species into local species lists. Using abundant opportunistic citizen science data from frequently visited wetlands we investigated the sensitivity of α- and β-diversity...

Anadromous salmonid fishes frequently exhibit strong geographic population structuring. However, population genetic differentiation of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) at fine geographic scales differs across equivalent spatial extents in different regions. So far, fine-scale genetic differentiation has not been assessed in rivers of the Baltic Sea, a region that contains an evolutionarily distinct Atlantic salmon lineage. Thus, Baltic salmon are currently managed on the river level, without focus on potential genetic structure and diversity within rivers....

Knowledge about the connectivity among natural populations is essential to identify management units for effective conservation actions. Conservation-minded management has led to the recovery of large carnivore populations in northern Europe, possibly restoring connectivity between the two separated, but expanding brown bear (Ursus arctos) populations on the Scandinavian peninsula to the west and Karelia, a part of the large Eurasian population, to the east. The degree of connectivity between these populations has been poorly understood,...

Failed oak regeneration is widely reported in temperate forests and has been linked in part to changed disturbance regimes and land-use. We investigated if the North American fire-oak hypothesis could be applicable to temperate European oaks (Q. robur, Q. petraea) using a replicated field experiment with contrasting canopy openness, protection against ungulate browsing (fencing/no fencing), and low-intensity surface fire (burn/no burn). Survival, relative height growth (RGRH), browsing damage on naturally regenerated oaks (≤300 cm tall),...

Lake‐dwelling fish that form species pairs/flocks characterized by body size divergence are important model systems for speciation research. Although several sources of divergent selection have been identified in these systems, their importance for driving the speciation process remains elusive. A major problem is that in retrospect, we cannot distinguish selection pressures that initiated divergence from those acting later in the process. To address this issue, we studied the initial stages of speciation in European whitefish...

The extrinsic determinants hypothesis emphasizes the essential role of environmental heterogeneity in species’ colonization. Consequently, high resident species diversity can increase community susceptibility to colonizations because good habitats may support more species that are functionally similar to colonizers. On the other hand, colonization success is also likely to depend on species traits. We tested the relative importance of environmental characteristics and species traits in determining colonization success using census data of 587 vascular plant species...

Background Native Swedish sheep breeds are part of the North European short-tailed sheep group; characterized in part by their genetic uniqueness. Our objective was to study the population structure of native Swedish sheep. Five breeds were genotyped using the 600 K SNP array. Dalapäls and Klövsjö sheep are from the middle of Sweden; Gotland and Gute sheep from Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea; and Fjällnäs sheep from northern Sweden. We studied population structure...

1. In agricultural landscapes, arthropods provide essential ecosystem services such as biological pest control and pollination. Intensified crop management practices and homogenization of landscapes have led to declines among such organisms. Semi-natural habitats, associated with high numbers of these organisms, are increasingly lost from agricultural landscapes but diversification by increasing crop diversity has been proposed as a way to reverse observed arthropod declines and thus restore ecosystem services. However, whether or not an increase in...

Floral plantings are promoted to foster ecological intensification of agriculture through provisioning of ecosystem services. However, a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of different floral plantings, their characteristics and consequences for crop yield is lacking. Here we quantified the impacts of flower strips and hedgerows on pest control (18 studies) and pollination services (17 studies) in adjacent crops in North America, Europe and New Zealand. Flower strips, but not hedgerows, enhanced pest control services in...