The multifaceted role of the environment in regulating the structure and dynamics of biological communities has long fascinated ecologists and motivated much debate and research. Now, in a time of accelerated global changes due to human impacts, the need to understand how the environment shapes communities has gained new urgency....
The causes of the global biodiversity crisis are varied and complex. Anthropogenic threats may act in isolation, or interact additively or synergistically with each other or with natural stressors to affect sensitive taxa. The recent emergence of many infectious diseases in wildlife has brought attention to the role of disease...
Ecologists must increasingly balance the need for accurate predictions about how ecosystems will be affected by climate change, against the fact that making such predictions at the ecosystem-level may be infeasible. Although information about responses of individual species to a changing environment is increasing, scaling such information to the community...
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent threats to ecological communities and biodiversity, altering the distribution and abundance of species, disrupting existing species interactions and forming unprecedented ones, and creating novel ecological communities. Many of the most successful invasive species are also ecosystem engineers, species that physically modify the...
With continual and worldwide human population growth, our impact on the natural environment expands and intensifies every day. We consume natural resources, burn fossil fuels, and release toxic compounds into the air, water, and earth. We build roads that fragment the landscape, construct new settlements, and develop agricultural lands in...
Biological invasions provide a unique opportunity to study the mechanisms that regulate community composition and ecosystem function. Invasive species that are also ecosystem engineers can substantially alter physical features in an environment, and this can lead to cascading effects on the biological community. Aquatic-terrestrial interface ecosystems are excellent systems to...
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K Parameter values for the 2- and 3-species communities at equilibrium. ........ 158
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Human actions are pushing natural systems into states that have no historical precedent. In response, empirical and theoretical researchers are increasingly focused on developing ways to predict the responses of ecological systems to change. However, significant knowledge gaps remain, often leading to “ecological surprises” where observed impacts of global change...
A central challenge for ecology is to understand the dynamic nature of species interactions. A classic approach to community ecology assumes that individuals within a species are functionally identical and that consumer-resource dynamics can be predicted solely by using species abundances. However, one species can consist of multiple functional groups,...
The size, shape, and stability of a species’ dietary niche can both influence and reflect a variety of biological patterns, including species interactions, extinction risk, and ecosystem function. This is particularly apparent when dietary changes manifest at ecosystem and clade scales to profoundly affect macroecological and macroevolutionary trajectories. However, many...
Rapid rates of biodiversity loss have supported the notion that Earth is experiencing a sixth major extinction event. The causes of worldwide biodiversity loss are multifaceted and context dependent. One of the most prominent groups experiencing population declines and extinctions are amphibians. Several pathogens and their associated diseases are especially...