Published in Oecologia
In tropical forests, large, old trees (LOTs) can be considered keystone structures for provisioning unique habitats such as decaying wood, roots, cavities, and epiphytes, including those that hold water (phytotelmata). These habitats may also be stratified in vertical space, for example, root structures occur at ground level and below, whereas epip...
Published in Oecologia
Plants interact with a diversity of phytophagous insects above- and belowground. By inducing plant defence, one insect herbivore species can antagonize or facilitate other herbivore species feeding on the same plant, even when they are separated in space and time. Through systemic plant-mediated interactions, leaf-chewing herbivores may affect the ...
Published in Oecologia
Floaters constitute the sexually mature but non-breeding part of populations. Despite being ubiquitous in most species, knowledge about floaters is scarce. Ignoring this significant number of individuals may strongly bias our understanding of population dynamics and sexual selection processes. We used the spotless starling ( Sturnus unicolor ) to e...
Published in Oecologia
Resolving the relative contributions of top-down versus bottom-up drivers of vegetation dynamics is a major challenge in drylands. In the coming decades, growing livestock populations and shifts in water availability will simultaneously impact many arid systems, but a lack of empirical data on plant responses to these pressures limits understanding...
Published in Oecologia
Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, highlighting the urgent requirement for well-designed protected areas. Design tactics previously proposed to promote biodiversity include enhancing the number, connectivity, and heterogeneity of reserve patches. However, how the importance of these features changes depending on what the conservati...
Published in Oecologia
Traffic noise is one of the leading causes of reductions in animal abundances near roads. Acoustic masking of conspecific signals and adventitious cues is one mechanism that likely causes animals to abandon loud areas. However, masking effects can be difficult to document in situ and the effects of infrequent noise events may be impractical to stud...
Published in Oecologia
Fish somatic growth is indeterminate and can be influenced by a range of abiotic and biotic variables. With climate change forecast to increase the frequency of warming and unusual discharge events, it is thus important to understand how these variables currently influence somatic growth and how that might differ for specific age-classes and/ or li...
Published in Oecologia
Cities are considered important refuges for insect pollinators. This has been shown repeatedly for wild bees, but may also be true for other diverse taxa such as hoverflies. However, our understanding of how urban environmental filters shape pollinator species communities and their traits is still limited. Here, we used wild bee and hoverfly specie...
Published in Oecologia
Highly competitive ephemeral resources like carrion tend to support much greater diversity relative to longer-lived resources. The coexistence of diverse communities on short-lived carrion is a delicate balance, maintained by several processes including competition. Despite this balance, few studies have investigated the effect of competition on ca...
Published in Oecologia
Foraging spatial segregation is frequent in central-place foragers during the breeding season, but very few studies have investigated foraging spatial segregation between adjacent sub-colonies. Here, we assessed for within-colony differences in the at-sea distribution, habitat use, trophic ecology and chick growth data of two Calonectris colonies d...
