Context: Isolated pasture trees play an important role in forest recovery within fragmented tropical landscapes by attracting seed dispersers and facilitating seedling growth. However, studies with conflicting results have led to confusion about what drives variation in zoochorous-dispersed seed rain patterns under isolated tree canopies. Objectives: To assess the role of landscape and biological factors impacting zoochorous-dispersed seed rain under isolated pasture trees across three tropical regions of the world. Methods: We measured seed dispersal...

Selection on individuals that incorporate risk to quickly and accurately make a priori navigational assessments may lead to increased spatial ability. Jumping spiders (Araneae: Salticidae) are characterized by their highly acute vision, which mediates many behaviors, including prey capture and navigation. When moving to a specific goal (prey, nest, a potential mate, etc.), salticids rely on visual cues and spatial memory to orient in three-dimensional space. Salticid spatial ability has been studied in homing and...

Aim: Species in ecological communities are linked by biotic interactions. It is therefore important to simultaneously study the impacts of global warming on interdependent taxa from different trophic levels. Here, we quantify current and potential future associations of functional diversity (based on multiple traits) and functional identity (based on individual traits) between interacting taxa using projection models under climate change. Location: A tropical elevational gradient (500–3500 m a.s.l.) in the Manú biosphere reserve, southeast Peru...

A core question in evolutionary biology is whether convergent phenotypic evolution is driven by convergent molecular changes in proteins or regulatory regions. We combined phylogenomic, developmental, and epigenomic analysis of 11 new genomes of paleognathous birds, including an extinct moa, to show that convergent evolution of regulatory regions, more so than protein-coding genes, is prevalent among developmental pathways associated with independent losses of flight. A Bayesian analysis of 284,001 conserved noncoding elements, 60,665 of which...

1. Natural and anthropogenic disturbances commonly alter patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, how networks of interacting species respond to these changes remains poorly understood. We described aquatic food webs using invertebrate and fish community composition, functional traits, and stable isotopes from twelve agricultural streams along a landscape disturbance gradient. 2. We predicted that excessive deposition of fine inorganic sediment (sedimentation) associated with agricultural activities would negatively influence aquatic trophic diversity (e.g., reduced vertical...

Farmland biodiversity benefits pollination, biological control and other key ecosystem services. Food safety has been seen as an exception to this broader pattern, as diverse farmlands attract wildlife that vector foodborne human pathogens. Resulting mitigation efforts thus often seek to deter wildlife by removing natural habitats, while also excluding vertebrate livestock. However, surprising recent evidence suggests that farm simplification actually increases the likelihood that produce will be contaminated with human pathogens. Here, we consider the...

Stochastic birth--death models provide the foundation for studying and simulating evolutionary trees in phylodynamics. A curious feature of such models is that they exhibit fundamental symmetries when the birth and death rates are interchanged. In this paper, we first provide intuitive reasons for these known transformational symmetries. We then show that these transformational symmetries (encoded in algebraic identities) are preserved even when individuals at the present are sampled with some probability. However, these extended symmetries...