Published in Ecology
Global overfishing of higher-level predators has caused cascading effects to lower trophic levels in many marine ecosystems. On coral reefs, which support highly diverse food-webs, the degree to which top-down trophic cascades can occur remains equivocal. Using extensive survey data from coral reefs across the relatively unfished northern Great Bar...
Published in Ecology
Herbivory is ubiquitous. Despite being a potential driver of plant distribution and performance, herbivory remains largely undocumented. Some early attempts have been made to review, globally, how much leaf area is removed through insect feeding. Kozlov et al. (2015), in one of the most comprehensive reviews regarding global patterns of herbivory, ...
Published in Ecology
The largest and tallest mountain range in the contiguous United States, the southern Rocky Mountains, has warmed considerably in the past several decades due to anthropogenic climate change. Herein we examine how 47 mammal elevational ranges (27 rodent and 4 shrew species) have changed from their historical distributions (1886-1979) to their contem...
Published in Ecology
Disturbance and foundation species can both have strong impacts on ecosystem structure and function, but studies of their interacting effects are hindered by the long lifespans and slow growth of most foundation species. Here, we investigated the extent to which foundation species may mediate the impacts of disturbance on ecological communities, us...
Published in Ecology
The response of understory trees to climate variability is key to understanding current and future forest dynamics. However, analyses of climatic effects on tree growth have primarily focused on the upper canopy, leaving understory dynamics unresolved. We analyzed differences in climate sensitivity based on canopy position of four common tree speci...
Published in Ecology
Nitrogen and phosphorus are thought to be the most important limiting nutrients in most terrestrial ecosystems, but little is known about how other elements may limit the abundance of arthropods. We utilized a fully factorial fertilization experiment that manipulated macronutrients (N and P, together) and micronutrients (calcium, sodium, potassium,...
Published in Ecology
Over the past two decades, liana density and basal area have been increasing in many tropical forests, which has profound consequences for forest diversity and functioning. One hypothesis to explain increasing lianas is elevated nutrient deposition in tropical forests resulting from fossil fuels, agricultural fertilizer, and biomass burning. We tes...
Published in Ecology
Sixty year ago, Charles Elton posed that species-rich communities should be more resistant to biological invasion. Still, little is known about which processes could drive the diversity-invasibility relationship. Here we examined whether soil-microbe-mediated apparent competition on alien invaders is more negative when the soil originates from mult...
Published in Ecology
In ecological meta-analyses, nonindependence among observed effect sizes from the same source paper is common. If not accounted for, nonindependence can seriously undermine inferences. We compared the performance of four meta-analysis methods that attempt to address such nonindependence and the standard random-effect model that ignores nonindepende...
Published in Ecology
Plant species' distributions are often thought to overwhelmingly reflect their climatic niches. However, climate represents only a fraction of the n-dimensional environment to which plant populations adapt, and studies are increasingly uncovering strong effects of non-climatic factors on species' distributions. We used a manipulative, factorial fie...
