Anthropogenic land use change facilitates disease emergence by altering the interface between humans and pathogen reservoirs and is hypothesized to drive pathogen evolution. Here, we show a positive association between land use change and the evolution and dispersal of Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) and Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV). We update the phylogeographies of EBOV and SUDV, which reveal that the most recent

All populations are affected by multiple environmental drivers, including climatic drivers such as temperature or precipitation and biotic drivers such as herbivory or mutualisms. The relative response of a population to each driver is critical to prioritizing threat mitigation for conservation and to understanding whether climatic or biotic drivers most strongly affect fitness. However, the importance

Insect–plant interactions are key determinants of plant and insect fitness, providing important ecosystem services around the world—including the Arctic region. Recently, it has been suggested that climate warming causes rifts between flower and pollinator phenology. To what extent the progression of pollinators matches the availability of flowers in the Arctic season is poorly known. In this study

Wet tropical forests play an important role in the global carbon (C) cycle, but given current rates of land‐use change, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) limitation could reduce productivity in regenerating forests in this biome. Whereas the strong controls of climate and parent material over forest recovery are well known, the influence of vegetation can be difficult to determine. We addressed species‐specific

Ecosystems worldwide are experiencing a range of natural and anthropogenic disturbances, many of which are intensifying as global change accelerates. Ecological responses to those disturbances are determined by both the vulnerabilities of species and their interspecific interactions. Understanding how individual species contribute to the (in‐)stability of an aggregated community property, or function

Biodiversity is threatened by both climate and land‐use change. However, the synergistic impacts of these stressors and the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study seeks to bridge this knowledge gap by testing two competing hypotheses regarding the concept of the realized thermal niche. The Fixed Niche Breadth hypothesis suggests that a species' thermal niche remains constant despite

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The removal or addition of a predator in an ecosystem can trigger a trophic cascade, whereby the predator indirectly influences plants and/or abiotic processes via direct effects on its herbivore prey. A trophic cascade can operate through a density‐mediated indirect effect (DMIE), where the predator reduces herbivore density via predation, and/or through a trait‐mediated indirect effect (TMIE), where

Spontaneous plant communities have undergone considerable constraints due to human‐mediated changes. Understanding how plant communities are shifting in response to land management and climate changes is necessary to predict future ecosystem functioning and improve the resilience of managed ecosystems, such as agroecosystems. Using Mediterranean weed communities as models of managed plant communities

Plants produce a great number of phytochemicals serving a variety of different functions. Recently, the chemodiversity of these compounds (i.e., the diversity of compounds produced by a plant) has been suggested to be an important aspect of the plant phenotype that may shape interactions between plants, their environment, and other organisms. However, we lack an agreement on how to quantify chemodiversity

Seminal ecological theories, island biogeography and the single large or several small (SLOSS) reserve debate, examine whether large contiguous habitats conserve biodiversity better than multiple smaller patches. Today, delineating the ecological effects of habitat area versus configuration in a fragmentation context remains difficult, and often confounds efforts to understand proximate and ultimate

Changes in host species richness can alter infection risk and disease levels in multi-host communities. I review theoretical predictions for direct and environmental transmission pathogens about the effects of host additions (or removals) on three commonly used disease metrics: the pathogen community reproduction number (R0) and infection prevalence and infected density in a focal host. To extend this

Global warming has been shifting climatic envelopes of many tree species to higher latitudes and elevations across the globe; however, unsuitable soil biota may inhibit tree migrations into these areas of suitable climate. Specifically, the role of mycorrhizal fungi in facilitating tree seedling establishment beyond natural species range limits has not been fully explored within forest ecosystems.

Alternative perspectives on the maintenance of biodiversity and the assembly of ecological communities suggest that both processes cannot be investigated simultaneously. In this concept and synthesis, we challenge this view by presenting major theoretical advances in structural stability and permanence theory. These advances, which provide complementary views, allow studying the short- and long-term

Large mammalian herbivores exert strong top-down control on plants, which in turn influence most ecological processes. Accordingly, the decline, displacement, or extinction of wild large herbivores in African savannas is expected to alter the physical structure of vegetation, the diversity of plant communities, and downstream ecosystem functions. However, herbivore impacts on vegetation comprise both

Mountain ecosystems play an important role globally as centers of biodiversity and in providing ecosystem services to lowland populations, but are influenced by multiple global change drivers such as climate change, nitrogen deposition, or altered disturbance regimes. As global change is accelerating and the consequences for humans and nature are intensifying, there is an increasing demand for understanding

A core aspiration of the ecological sciences is to determine how systems work, which implies the challenge of developing a causal understanding. Causal inference has long been approached from a statistical perspective, which can be limited and restrictive for a variety of reasons. Ecologists and other natural scientists have historically pursued mechanistic knowledge as an alternative approach to causal

Parasites can alter the traits or densities of mutualistic partners, potentially destabilizing mutualistic associations that underpin the structure, functioning, and stability of entire ecosystems. Despite the potentially wide-ranging consequences of such disruptions, no studies have directly manipulated parasite prevalence and/or intensity in a mutualistic partner, nor quantified the resulting community-level

Community-wide assembly of plant–pollinator systems depends on an intricate combination of biotic and abiotic factors, including heterogeneity among pollinators in thermal biology and responses to abiotic factors. Studies on the thermal biology of pollinators have mostly considered only one or a few species of plants or pollinators at a time, and the possible driving role of the diversity in thermal

Bamboos are perennial woody grasses that display an enigmatic mix of traits. Bamboo is highly shade intolerant like early-successional trees. Without secondary xylem, bamboos cannot continue to grow once they reach a maximum height or replace xylem damaged by hydraulic stress and must instead replace each stem after a few years using vegetative propagation via rhizomes. These traits of bamboo would

Erratum for Hobbs, N. Thompson, Danielle B. Johnston, Kristin N. Marshall, Evan C. Wolf, and David J. Cooper. 2024. “Does Restoring Apex Predators to Food Webs Restore Ecosystems? Large Carnivores in Yellowstone as a Model System.” Ecological Monographs 94(2): e1598. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1598. The authors wish to convey several corrections within the “Discussion: Comparison with other studies

Ecological niche differentiation is a process that accompanies lineage diversification and community assembly. Traditionally, the degree of niche differentiation is estimated by contrasting niche hypervolumes of two taxa, reconstructed using ecologically relevant variables. These methods disregard the fact that niches can shift in different ways and directions. Without means of discriminating between

Forests are critical to water resources, but high evapotranspiration (ET) can reduce water yield. Thinning and prescribed fire reduce forest density and often reduce ET, promoting higher water yield. However, results from such treatments have been inconsistent, possibly because of unknown interactions among individual ET components. We compare water budget components of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris

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Peatlands store large amounts of carbon (C), a function potentially threatened by climate change. Peatlands composed of vascular cushion plants are widespread in the northern and central high Andes (páramo, wet and dry puna), but their C dynamics are hardly known. To understand the interplay of the main drivers of peatland C dynamics and to infer geographic patterns across the Andean regions, we addressed

Estimating the abundance of unmarked animal populations from acoustic data is challenging due to the inability to identify individuals and the need to adjust for observation biases including detectability (false negatives), species misclassification (false positives), and sampling exposure. Acoustic surveys conducted along mobile transects were designed to avoid counting individuals more than once

Because of the first observations in the 1900s of the oligotrophic and eutrophic states of lakes, researchers have been interested in the process that makes lakes become turbid because of high phytoplankton biomass. Definitions of eutrophication have multiplied and diversified since the mid-20th century, more than for any other ecological process. Reasons for the high number of definitions might be

Climate-driven alterations to disturbance regimes are increasingly disrupting patterns of recovery in many biomes. Here, we examine the impact of disturbance and subsequent level of recovery in live hard coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) across the last three decades. We demonstrate that a preexisting pattern of infrequent disturbances of limited spatial extent has changed to larger and more

The increasing density of woody plants threatens the integrity of grassy ecosystems. It remains unclear if such encroachment can be explained mostly by direct effects of resources on woody plant growth or by indirect effects of disturbances imposing tree recruitment limitation. Here, we investigate whether woody plant functional traits provide a mechanistic understanding of the complex relationships

Biomes are large-scale ecosystems occupying large spaces. The biome concept should theoretically facilitate scientific synthesis of global-scale studies of the past, present, and future biosphere. However, there is neither a consensus biome map nor universally accepted definition of terrestrial biomes, making joint interpretation and comparison of biome-related studies difficult. “Desert,” “rainforest

Imaging spectroscopy is emerging as a leading remote sensing method for quantifying plant biodiversity. The spectral variation hypothesis predicts that variation in plant hyperspectral reflectance is related to variation in taxonomic and functional identity. While most studies report some correlation between spectral and field-based (i.e., taxonomic and functional) expressions of biodiversity, the

Despite the importance of population structures throughout ecology, relatively little theoretical attention has been paid to understanding the implications of social groups for population dynamics. The dynamics of socially structured populations differ substantially from those of unstructured or metapopulation-structured populations, because social groups themselves may split, fuse, and compete. These

Global climate change is predicted to cause range shifts in the mosquito species that transmit pathogens to humans and wildlife. Recent modeling studies have sought to improve our understanding of the relationship between temperature and the transmission potential of mosquito-borne pathogens. However, the role of the vertebrate host population, including the importance of host behavioral defenses on

Ecological networks describe the interactions between different species, informing us how they rely on one another for food, pollination, and survival. If a species in an ecosystem is under threat of extinction, it can affect other species in the system and possibly result in their secondary extinction as well. Understanding how (primary) extinctions cause secondary extinctions on ecological networks

Animals that feed socially can sometimes better locate prey, often by transferring information about food that is patchy, dense, and temporally and spatially unpredictable. Information transfer is a potential benefit of living in breeding colonies where unsuccessful foragers can more readily locate successful ones and thereby improve feeding efficiency. Most studies on social foraging have been short

The discipline of ecology seeks to understand how ecosystems, communities, and populations are regulated. A ubiquitous mechanism of population regulation of consumers is that capturing energy and nutrients in sufficient quantities for survival and reproduction becomes more difficult as population density increases. Extensive evidence has revealed that populations of large herbivores are often regulated

Migratory, long-lived animals are an important focus for life-history theory because they manifest extreme trade-offs in life-history traits: delayed maturity, low fecundity, variable recruitment rates, long generation times, and vital rates that respond to variation across environments. Galapagos tortoises are an iconic example: they are long-lived, migrate seasonally, face multiple anthropogenic

Modification of food webs is a frequent cause of shifts in ecosystem states that resist reversal when the food web is restored to its original condition. We used the restoration of the large carnivore guild including gray wolves (Canis lupis), cougars (Felis concolor), and grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) to the northern range of Yellowstone National Park as a model system to understand how

Species turnover with elevation is a widespread phenomenon and provides valuable information on why and how ecological communities might reorganize as the climate warms. It is commonly assumed that species interactions are more likely to set warm range limits, while physiological tolerances determine cold range limits. However, most studies are from temperate systems and rely on correlations between

The contribution of genetic adaptation and plasticity to intraspecific phenotypic variability remains insufficiently studied in long-lived plants, as well as the relevance of neutral versus adaptive processes determining such divergence. We examined the importance of phylogeographic structure and climate in modulating genetic and plastic changes and their interdependence in fitness-related traits of

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Genomic data are increasingly being integrated into macroecological forecasting, offering an evolutionary perspective that has been largely missing from global change biogeography. Genomic offset, which quantifies the disruption of genotype–environment associations under environmental change, allows for the incorporation of intraspecific climate-associated genomic differentiation into forecasts of

The dynamic interactions between predators and their prey have two fundamental processes: numerical and functional responses. Numerical response is defined as predator growth rate as a function of prey density or both prey and predator densities [dP/dt = f(N, P)]. Functional response is defined as the kill rate by an individual predator being a function of prey density or prey and predator densities

Predicting the outcome of interactions between species is central to our current understanding of diversity maintenance. However, we have limited information about the robustness of many model-based predictions of species coexistence. This limitation is partly because several sources of uncertainty are often ignored when making predictions. Here, we introduce a framework to simultaneously explore how

Despite the well known scale-dependency of ecological interactions, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding the dynamic interplay between various spatial scales. This is especially notable in metacommunity theory, where births and deaths dominate dynamics within patches (the local scale), and dispersal and environmental stochasticity dominate dynamics between patches (the regional

Multiyear periods (≥4 years) of extreme rainfall are increasing in frequency as climate continues to change, yet there is little understanding of how rainfall amount and heterogeneity in biophysical properties affect state changes in a sequence of wet and dry periods. Our objective was to examine the importance of rainfall periods, their legacies, and vegetation and soil properties to either the persistence

Understanding ecological dynamics has been a central topic in ecology since its origins. Yet, identifying dynamic regimes remains a research frontier for modern ecology. The concept of ecological dynamic regime (EDR) emerged to emphasize the dynamic property of steady states in nature and refers to the fluctuations of ecosystems around some trend or average. Identifying and characterizing EDRs is of

COVER PHOTO: The cover image shows colonization of sessile taxa on coral rubble at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. In their study in this issue, Wolfe et al. (Article e1586; doi:10.1002/ecm.1586) use hierarchical structuring theory to characterize hidden biodiversity on coral reefs from seascape to microhabitat perspectives. Through an in-depth assessment of community structure in

Based on sampling data, we propose a rigorous standardization method to measure and compare beta diversity across datasets. Here beta diversity, which quantifies the extent of among-assemblage differentiation, relies on Whittaker's original multiplicative decomposition scheme, but we use Hill numbers for any diversity order q ≥ 0. Richness-based beta diversity (q = 0) quantifies the extent of species

Alternative states defined by tree-canopy dominance result in different ecosystem functioning and shape habitat conditions for the understory vegetation. One example in the boreal forest is the alternation between broadleaf deciduous and coniferous forests. Disturbances related to natural fires and human land uses have produced changes in tree-canopy dominance in the boreal region where coniferous

Declines in habitat structural complexity have marked ecological outcomes, as currently observed in many of the world's ecosystems. Coral reefs have provided a model for such changes in marine ecosystems; still our understanding has been centered on corals and fishes at broad spatial scales when metazoan diversity on coral reefs is dominated by small cryptic taxa (herein: “cryptofauna”). Given the

The temporal storage effect—that species coexist by partitioning abiotic niches that vary in time—is thought to be an important explanation for how species coexist. However, empirical studies that measure multiple mechanisms often find the storage effect is weak. We believe this mismatch is because of a shortcoming of theoretical models used to study the storage effect: that while the storage effect

Ongoing declines in insect populations have led to substantial concern and calls for conservation action. However, even for relatively well studied groups, like butterflies, information relevant to species-specific status and risk is scattered across field guides, the scientific literature, and agency reports. Consequently, attention and resources have been spent on a minuscule fraction of insect diversity