1. Ecological communities can be relatively stable for long periods of time, and then, often as a result of disturbance, transition rapidly to a novel state. When communities fail to recover to pre-disturbance configurations, they are said to have experienced a regime shift or to be in an alternative stable state....
Video of overland dispersal and drought escape behavior in a flightless aquatic insect, the giant water bug Abedus herberti (Hemiptera: Belostomaidae). April 9, 2009 High Creek, Galiuro Mountains, Arizona (AZ) USA.
Experimental manipulations of streamflow have been used globally in recent decades to mitigate the impacts of dam operations on river systems. Rivers are challenging subjects for experimentation, because they are open systems that cannot be isolated from their social context. We identify principles to address the challenges of conducting effective...
Floods are a key component of the ecology and management of riverine
ecosystems around the globe, but it is not clear whether floods have predictable effects on
organisms that can allow us to generalize across regions and continents. To address this, we
conducted a global-scale meta-analysis to investigate effects of...
Greater scientific knowledge, changing societal values, and legislative mandates have emphasized the importance
of implementing large-scale flow experiments (FEs) downstream of dams. We provide the first global assessment
of FEs to evaluate their success in advancing science and informing management decisions. Systematic
review of 113 FEs across 20 countries revealed...
The study of how population genetic structure is shaped by attributes of the environment is a central scientific pursuit in ecology and conservation. But limited resources may prohibit landscape genetics studies for many threatened species, particularly given the pace of current environmental change. Understanding the extent to which species' ecological...
AIM:
Meta-community structure is a function of both local (site-specific) and regional (landscape-level) ecological factors, and the relative importance of each may be mediated by the dispersal ability of organisms. Here, we used aquatic invertebrate communities to investigate the relationship between local and regional factors in explaining distance decay relationships...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Functional trait analysis is an appealing approach to study differences among biological communities because traits determine species' responses to the environment and their impacts on ecosystem functioning. Despite a rapidly expanding quantitative literature, it remains challenging to conceptualize concurrent changes in multiple trait dimensions (“trait space”) and select quantitative functional...
Hydrology is the main environmental filter in aquatic ecosystems and may result in shared tolerances and functional traits among species in disparate ecosystems. We analyzed the associations between taxonomic and functional facets of diversity within aquatic ecosystems (ponds vs. streams) across a hydroperiod gradient (1–365 d) to untangle the hydrologic...