Samuel J. Leonard, Mulin Huan, Paul Schmidt, Jonathan M. Levine
{"title":"Seasonal evolution and its effects on competition","authors":"Samuel J. Leonard, Mulin Huan, Paul Schmidt, Jonathan M. Levine","doi":"10.1002/ecm.70060","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ecm.70060","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Rapid evolution can influence competitive dynamics. While theory and past work have focused on the competitive consequences of rapid evolution in response to competitors (e.g., character displacement), abiotic environmental factors are also responsible for much of the rapid evolution observed in nature. Yet, we lack knowledge of how evolution in response to a variable abiotic environment shapes competition between evolving species. Our knowledge of these effects is limited not only by the absence of direct quantification of environment-driven evolution's effects on competition, but also by the rarity of systems in which environment-driven evolution itself has been measured across multiple competitors. Here, we used an outdoor mesocosm experiment with three species of naturally co-occurring drosophilid fly competitors to quantify seasonal evolution of stress tolerance and reproductive traits and the effects of this evolution on demographic performance under competition. We found that rapid seasonal evolution occurred across all three species, across all measured traits, and across every sampling interval. Throughout the course of their growing season, species first converged on similar phenotypic profiles (e.g., high heat tolerance and low fecundity), then evolved in parallel. This seasonal evolution had clear impacts on pairwise competition between species. In competition trials in a common garden greenhouse environment, seasonal evolution had the potential to alter competitive fitness, measured as species' demographic performance during one full generation of competition, by over 30%. Under seasonally varying field conditions over the summer, in one species pair, seasonal evolution combined with changing environmental conditions had 7x stronger effects on competitive fitness than did the changing environmental conditions alone. Our work highlights that the rapid, environment-driven evolution increasingly documented by evolutionary biologists can have an underappreciated influence on ecological competitive dynamics.</p>","PeriodicalId":11505,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Monographs","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2026-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecm.70060","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147720070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pu Yan, Nianpeng He, Kailiang Yu, Lawren Sack, Lin Jiang, Marcos Fernández-Martínez
{"title":"Plant elemental diversity increases ecosystem productivity and temporal stability","authors":"Pu Yan, Nianpeng He, Kailiang Yu, Lawren Sack, Lin Jiang, Marcos Fernández-Martínez","doi":"10.1002/ecm.70061","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ecm.70061","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The elemental composition of organisms (i.e., the elementome) directly constrains metabolic machinery and aligns with functional traits, linking organismal performance to nutrient cycling and energy flow at the ecosystem level. In theory, elemental diversity captures the community functional heterogeneity by quantifying variation in the multidimensional elementomes of co-occurring species within a community. However, empirical evidence connecting organismal elemental diversity to ecosystem functioning and identifying its environmental controls remains scarce. We compiled an unprecedented dataset on plant elemental concentrations, encompassing more than 2500 species and 14 analyzed elements (including macronutrients, micronutrients, and trace elements) sampled from leaves, stems, trunks, and fine roots across 8 biomes and 72 sites, covering multiple ecosystem types including forests and grasslands. Using these data, we investigated the spatial patterns and drivers of plant elemental diversity and evaluated its relationship with ecosystem productivity and stability. Our results indicate that plant elemental diversity decreased with latitude, with interannual variability in temperature and mean annual precipitation as the primary controls on its spatial distribution. Moreover, ecosystems with higher plant elemental diversity exhibit greater efficiency in the use of carbon, water, and light, thereby translating into higher productivity and greater temporal stability across and within forests and grasslands, and these effects persisted even after accounting for climate and soil factors. Taken together, our results support the influence of plant elemental diversity as a distinct dimension of biodiversity with functional implications. Complementing trait- and taxonomy-based measures, plant elemental diversity improves predictions of ecosystem productivity and temporal stability under ongoing climatic variability, and can substantially advance research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.</p>","PeriodicalId":11505,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Monographs","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2026-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147681645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Monica M. Sheffer, Brian Schulze, Linda Zander, Pierick Mouginot, Thomas Naef, Michael Lalk, Martina Wurster, Clara Ahrend, Jürgen Kreyling, Rosemary G. Gillespie, Katharina J. Hoff, Stefan Prost, Henrik Krehenwinkel, Gabriele B. Uhl
{"title":"Rapid ecological and evolutionary divergence during a poleward range expansion","authors":"Monica M. Sheffer, Brian Schulze, Linda Zander, Pierick Mouginot, Thomas Naef, Michael Lalk, Martina Wurster, Clara Ahrend, Jürgen Kreyling, Rosemary G. Gillespie, Katharina J. Hoff, Stefan Prost, Henrik Krehenwinkel, Gabriele B. Uhl","doi":"10.1002/ecm.70047","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ecm.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Understanding how species distributions respond to environmental change is a key question in ecology and evolution. While many species are shifting their ranges, the mechanisms driving the extent and rate of these shifts, and the consequences of their establishment in a novel environment, are often poorly understood. Particularly interesting groups of organisms to study in this context are those that have shifted their distributions faster than warming average temperatures alone can explain. Our study investigates whether adaptation to colder temperatures in novel northern environments—and associated life history trade-offs across different life stages—explains this apparent mismatch between climate change and the pace of range expansion. Unlike many range-expanding taxa, our focal species, the wasp spider <i>Argiope bruennichi</i>, disperses passively via ballooning, and as a generalist mesopredator, its expansion is not limited by host plant availability and can exert significant bottom-up and top-down ecosystem effects, making it of particular interest. We integrated analyses of adult phenology, morphology, offspring cold tolerance, and genome-wide variation to test which traits are likely driven by adaptation to colder conditions or whether phenotypic plasticity drives the rapid northward expansion. Females matured earlier at smaller sizes at the range edge. The lack of a concurrent reduction in fecundity suggests that genetic adaptation plays a role. Hatched juveniles that overwintered in their egg sacs were subjected to a reciprocal common garden experiment that simulated either core or edge winter temperatures. Edge-origin spiderlings exhibited lower overall overwinter survival, but the surviving ones had lower lethal temperatures and enhanced supercooling ability than their core-origin counterparts. Furthermore, metabolomic profiles revealed that cold stress-induced accumulation of amino acids and myo-inositol likely contributes to improved cold tolerance. A genome-wide analysis delineated two distinct genetic clusters across Europe, separated by central Germany, and showed that genetic variation is linked to winter climate and seasonality gradients. Overall, our data support genetic differentiation as a major driver of the observed differences, coupled with considerable phenotypic plasticity. Our integrated approach underscores the necessity of assessing trait evolution across life stages to understand how organisms overcome climatic barriers, thus elucidating the mechanisms underlying rapid range expansion.</p>","PeriodicalId":11505,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Monographs","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2026-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecm.70047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147523930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Philipp Brun, Izabela Moise, Patrice Descombes, Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Fernando Perez-Cruz, Dirk Nikolaus Karger, Damaris Zurell
{"title":"Using recommender systems to analyze and predict plant communities from partial assemblages","authors":"Philipp Brun, Izabela Moise, Patrice Descombes, Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Fernando Perez-Cruz, Dirk Nikolaus Karger, Damaris Zurell","doi":"10.1002/ecm.70056","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ecm.70056","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Safeguarding biodiversity requires a detailed understanding of the biosphere, especially regarding the distribution and state of habitats. Citizen science data offer a rich source of useful information, but they usually only contain partial records of species assemblages, as predominantly opportunistic observations of individual species are reported. We explored the capacity of recommender systems—a class of algorithms originally developed for tasks like recommending movies to users on streaming platforms—to fill gaps in citizen science data and assign unreported plant species to partial assemblages, using opportunistic presence-only observations as training data. We employed a hierarchical Poisson factorization (HPF) model to learn distributions exclusively from pixel-wise pooled observations, which were synthesized to a site-by-species matrix of a dimension of <i>c</i>. 80,000 × 2000 covering Switzerland. Based on about 1500 independent surveys, we assessed HPF's capacity to predict held-out species and compared these to predictions from traditional species distribution models (SDMs). Moreover, we investigated HPF's latent features, that is, its low-dimensional summaries of the similarity in species' occurrence across sites and the similarity in site suitability for species. Indicator species of most broad habitat categories distinguished in Switzerland clustered significantly in species-related latent feature space, indicating a high capacity of HPF to approximate co-occurrence. Patterns in site-related latent features were primarily explained by climate, soil, and topography. However, about 40% of the signal could not be attributed to gridded predictors and likely mirrors small-scale differences, for example, due to disturbances like those experienced in ruderal habitats. Predictive performance of HPF was close to that of SDMs if 20 (or 49% by median) species were observed at a site. However, when ensembling predictions of HPF and SDMs, performance could be improved for sites with ≥6 species observed. HPF predictions performed comparably well in disturbed habitats like roadside vegetation and comparably poorly in habitats experiencing elevated environmental filtering, such as subalpine forests. Given their ability to efficiently learn the distribution of entire floras based on presence-only data, their unique capacity to obtain generalized co-occurrence proxies from partial inventories, and their potential to boost distributional predictions, recommender systems can valuably contribute to improving our understanding of the biosphere.</p>","PeriodicalId":11505,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Monographs","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2026-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecm.70056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147506921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yumei Li, Yunfeng Chen, Wei Wang, Kai Liu, Hanqing Liu, Ming Lu, Zexuan Gao, Haoyang Wang, Yonggang Nie
{"title":"Habitat heterogeneity and anthropogenic disturbance jointly affect species spatial associations and persistence","authors":"Yumei Li, Yunfeng Chen, Wei Wang, Kai Liu, Hanqing Liu, Ming Lu, Zexuan Gao, Haoyang Wang, Yonggang Nie","doi":"10.1002/ecm.70059","DOIUrl":"10.1002/ecm.70059","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Interspecific interactions are of central importance to community assembly and are closely associated with ecosystem productivity, functioning, and stability. However, seasonal fluctuations in interspecific interactions and their resilience to anthropogenic disturbances and three-dimensional (3D) habitat heterogeneity remain largely unexplored. Traditional methods encounter difficulties in quantitatively describing 3D habitats. To address this, we integrated high-resolution unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR), systematic camera trapping, and dynamic multispecies, multistate occurrence models to investigate the persistence mechanisms of interspecific spatial associations. Focusing on large- and medium-sized mammal communities in human-dominated landscapes with 3D heterogeneity within the Tiebu Sika Deer Nature Reserve, our study provides new insights into the mechanisms underlying biotic interactions. Results indicated that mammals exhibited stronger antagonistic spatial associations in winter, characterized by stronger negative or weaker positive correlations. Free-ranging livestock influenced the distributions (pairwise interactions) and interspecific spatial associations (higher order interactions) of wildlife. The extent of this influence relied on the trophic interactions (predation or competition) between the free-ranging livestock and wildlife. Human disturbances, beyond domestic livestock, have further reversed species' spatial associations, compounding the effects of domestic animals. Conversely, 3D habitat heterogeneity can facilitate the persistence of species' spatial associations, encompassing both pairwise and intricate higher order interactions, thereby mitigating the impacts of human activities on these associations. In general, our results highlighted that various human disturbances can exert cumulative effects on the spatial associations between species, while three-dimensional habitat heterogeneity mediated the human impacts.</p>","PeriodicalId":11505,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Monographs","volume":"96 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2026-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147492774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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