Ecological Applications最新文献

{"title":"Not all spatially structured populations are metapopulations: Re-examining paradigms for a threatened shorebird","authors":"Rose J. Swift,&nbsp;Michael J. Anteau,&nbsp;Kristen S. Ellis,&nbsp;Garrett J. MacDonald,&nbsp;Megan M. Ring,&nbsp;Mark H. Sherfy,&nbsp;Dustin L. Toy,&nbsp;David N. Koons","doi":"10.1002/eap.70037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70037","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For at-risk species, understanding population vital rates is imperative for developing informed conservation strategies and population models. Managers often assume that species that are spatially distributed among patches of suitable habitat meet the criteria of a metapopulation. Metapopulation dynamics are determined not only by within-patch birth and death processes but also by between-patch dispersal movements of individuals that are infrequent but critical to maintaining population viability across space and time. To conserve and manage such species, an understanding of all these vital rates, including connectivity, is required. The degree to which the northern Great Plains piping plover (<i>Charadrius melodus</i>) breeding population functions as a metapopulation depends, in part, on the rate of movement among patchily distributed breeding areas. Here, we examined annual adult survival and breeding dispersal probabilities for 2582 individuals at two spatial scales within the northern Great Plains piping plover breeding population between 2014 and 2019. Inconsistent with a metapopulation structure, annual survival varied minimally among breeding regions but did vary across years. We also found that breeding dispersal probabilities were temporally variable, high, and unbalanced at both spatial scales examined, suggesting high connectivity in contrast to metapopulation dynamics. Further, we detected context-dependent effects of reproductive success on dispersal decisions. Individuals were more likely to disperse from the northern Missouri River to the US Alkali Wetlands following nest failure due to inundation or severe storms (including in the year prior to dispersal), whereas dispersal from the US Alkali Wetlands to the northern Missouri River decreased following successful nest attempts. Individuals also decreased dispersal from the US Alkali Wetlands to the northern Missouri River in response to renesting attempts in both the year of interest and the year prior to dispersal. Our results contradict the paradigm that northern Great Plains piping plovers are structured as a metapopulation and instead suggest a patchily distributed, likely panmictic, population. Our findings have implications for the conservation and management of this listed species and are also a general reminder that in the absence of robust knowledge of movement, spatial variation in birth and death processes across patches should not be conflated with a metapopulation structure.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144273337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Breeding performance of an aerial insectivorous bird under contrasting farming systems","authors":"José M. Zamora-Marín,&nbsp;Antonio Zamora-López,&nbsp;Mario León-Ortega,&nbsp;Pedro Sáez-Gómez,&nbsp;Francisco A. García-Castellanos,&nbsp;José A. Sánchez-Zapata,&nbsp;Carlos Camacho","doi":"10.1002/eap.70059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70059","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Over the past decades, intensive agriculture has expanded worldwide in response to the rising human demand for food. Intensive farming practices commonly involve the application of pesticides and other agrochemical compounds, contributing to the global decline in farmland bird populations, particularly aerial insectivores. Moreover, the increased mechanization of agricultural operations (e.g., grass cutting, tree pruning, and brush chipping) may destroy nests and reduce the breeding success of ground-nesting bird species. Here, we used a ground-nesting insectivorous bird, the Red-necked Nightjar (<i>Caprimulgus ruficollis</i>), as a model to test for the effects of organic vs. intensive farming practices on breeding performance. We used data from 191 nightjar nests monitored over a 4-year period in a highly cultivated landscape of SE Spain. Four breeding parameters (clutch size, hatching success, fledging success, and overall breeding success) were compared between two adjacent farms under organic and conventional intensive management. Additionally, we compared four population-level attributes (breeding phenology, breeding density, age structure of breeders, and foraging range size) considered to be important determinants of breeding performance. Nightjars breeding in the organic and in the intensive farms had a moderate breeding performance comparable to that reported in other, more extensive agricultural landscapes (e.g., vineyards). All breeding parameters and two out of the four measured population-level attributes were statistically not different between the organic and the intensive farm. However, nest aggregation was higher in the organic farm, and space use analyses revealed that GPS-tracked nightjars nesting within the intensive farm traveled to foraging areas outside the farm more often than those from the organic farm. This suggests that plasticity in foraging behavior (e.g., the use of alternative foraging sites) may buffer the potential negative effects of intensive farming practices (e.g., decreased prey availability) on the breeding performance of nightjars. Our study underlines the potential role of landscape complementation and ecological plasticity in space-use behaviors as determinants of breeding performance in farmland birds, enabling these species to (partly) compensate for the impacts of intensive agriculture.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.70059","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144281377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Large, isolated trees have higher mortality than smaller trees in forest fragments across a tropical pastoral landscape","authors":"Cristina Barber,&nbsp;Jennyffer Cruz,&nbsp;Sarah J. Graves,&nbsp;Stephanie A. Bohlman,&nbsp;Pieter A. Zuidema,&nbsp;Gregory P. Asner,&nbsp;Aaron Carignan,&nbsp;Vicente Vasquez,&nbsp;Jodi Brandt,&nbsp;T. Trevor Caughlin","doi":"10.1002/eap.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Agricultural tree cover is declining globally, including the loss of large, scattered trees that function as keystone structures. Understanding the drivers of agricultural tree loss could help prevent further declines. However, the drivers of agricultural tree mortality vary across scales, from individual trees to landscapes, complicating efforts to quantify mortality risk. We applied high-resolution remote sensing and multi-method occupancy models to test hypotheses of drivers of tree mortality in a pastoral landscape of Southwestern Panama. Our approach enabled us to identify individual tree mortality across a &gt;20,000 ha area, encompassing a wide range of land use intensity. Neighboring tree cover was the strongest predictor of mortality, with a higher probability of death for isolated trees relative to trees with many neighbors. Landscape-level covariates also predicted mortality risk, including higher mortality closer to roads and in parcels with larger area. These results implicate land use intensity as a primary driver of agricultural tree loss in our study area. At the individual tree level, we found that larger trees were more likely to die than smaller trees. Our study suggests that the trees with high ecosystem service value in a fragmented landscape—large, isolated trees—also face the highest mortality risk. Supporting agricultural practices that maintain trees in pastures is likely to decrease tree mortality in our study site, broadly representative of cattle ranching landscapes across Latin America. Our workflow could be implemented in other landscapes globally to prioritize agricultural tree conservation, paving the way for increased tree survival and improved ecosystem services.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144255935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Method matters: Comparing habitat- and process-based approaches for favorability assessment","authors":"Galen Holt,&nbsp;Georgia K. Dwyer,&nbsp;Rebecca E. Lester","doi":"10.1002/eap.70060","DOIUrl":"10.1002/eap.70060","url":null,"abstract":"<p>It is common to use environmental conditions combined with habitat delineations as proxies for ecological outcomes, such as inundation of particular wetland habitats as a proxy for vegetation persistence. An alternative is to include physical environmental conditions as drivers in process-based models that capture important events in a life cycle, thereby accounting for the environmental and biological conditions that enable those events to occur. Each approach has benefits and drawbacks and is likely to give a different assessment of the state of the target ecological responses. We modeled four iconic species of woody vegetation in the Murray–Darling Basin and considered two approaches to identifying areas favorable for each species: “habitat-based,” the area of inundation in wetland types associated with each species, and “process-based,” a model of the life cycle dependent on the amount, timing, and sequence of inundation and soil moisture. Calculating favorable area using inundation of identified wetland types in a habitat-based approach provided a fundamentally different assessment to using a small number of life-cycle processes (i.e., a process-based approach). Further, favorable areas often did not overlap in space, with many locations found to be favorable using one method but not the other. There may be useful information to be gleaned from comparing the two, such as identifying locations of possible contraction or expansion of the species in the future. However, it is clear that the two approaches are not equivalent and care is needed in selecting an appropriate method for a given application.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.70060","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144237724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Return of diversity: Wetland plant community recovery following purple loosestrife biocontrol","authors":"Stacy B. Endriss,&nbsp;Victoria Nuzzo,&nbsp;Bernd Blossey","doi":"10.1002/eap.70064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70064","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Spread of non-native species can be important drivers of biodiversity declines, leading to precautionary management based on assumptions that (1) non-native biota have negative impacts and are “guilty” of causing harm and (2) reducing a non-native species' abundance will reduce these negative impacts, in turn, benefiting native species. However, we frequently lack data to gauge both negative impacts of non-native species and success or failure of chosen management interventions to benefit native species. Addressing these knowledge gaps is critical to improving management outcomes for native species while maintaining public trust to sustain funding of management activities. Here, we investigated the response of <i>Lythrum salicaria</i> (purple loosestrife) and associated plant communities to implementation of biological control in more than 10 wetland sites in New York State for up to 28 years. Introduced to North America from Europe in the 1800s, <i>L. salicaria</i> is a prime example of a non-native species with a continent-wide distribution that could not be suppressed by mechanical and chemical treatments. In the 1980s, waterfowl biologists, wetland managers, and conservationists alike worried about the loss of diverse wetland plant communities associated with the rapid expansion of <i>L. salicaria.</i> In response, after careful assessments of safety, and potential costs and benefits, four highly host-specific insect herbivores were released in North America in the early 1990s to reduce <i>L. salicaria</i> abundance and its negative ecological impacts. In a companion paper, Blossey et al. documented reduced <i>L. salicaria</i> occupancy and stem densities following insect releases over time (i.e., biological success), irrespective of site-specific differences in starting plant communities or <i>L. salicaria</i> abundance. Here, we show that reduced abundance of <i>L. salicaria</i> leads to the ultimate goal of non-native plant management: increased cover, abundance, and diversity of species, often of native species (i.e., ecological success). We also conduct analyses to provide inference about which plant species are most sensitive to <i>L. salicaria</i>, including changes in <i>L. salicaria</i> stem density. Overall, we provide an important conservation success story: our findings emphasize that biocontrol of non-native plants can be effective and safe, allowing native species to recover as a dominant non-native species gradually declines.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.70064","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144232314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Estimating occupancy and nest survival of cliff-nesting raptors in an open population framework","authors":"Jeremy D. Mizel,&nbsp;Melanie J. Flamme","doi":"10.1002/eap.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Nest survival is a key demographic parameter for assessing the viability of bird populations and is frequently responsive to management. While nest survival is often monitored alone, its joint monitoring with abundance permits a more thorough understanding of breeding productivity and the mechanisms of population change. However, nests are subject to a time-to-event process that presents a challenge for joint modeling of these processes. That is, availability for detection is conditional on nest survival until the survey occasion, which, if ignored, results in negatively biased estimates of nest abundance or presence/absence (breeding occupancy). Cliff-nesting raptor abundance and reproductive success have been the subject of intense conservation concern with the recognition of widespread population declines and manifold persecution. Inferences about changes in cliff-nesting raptor abundance and reproductive success are often based on the unadjusted occupancy rates and apparent nest success. Here, we developed methods for joint estimation of breeding occupancy and nest survival in these populations, thereby extending occupancy models to the case in which the occupancy states are subject to an explicit time-to-event process. Our approach accommodates false negatives in the occupancy data due to nest failure prior to the sampling occasions. A simulation study with varied detection probability, nest success, and Markov properties in occupancy showed our model to generally have low to moderate bias. We applied the model to data from American Peregrine Falcon (<i>Falco peregrinus anatum</i>) monitoring in Alaska (1987–2021) with conspicuous observer and stage-specific heterogeneity. Breeding occupancy increased over time while nest success decreased, suggesting potential density-dependent effects. Our approach will allow the discarding of the untenable assumption of constant detectability common to cliff-nesting raptor studies while also helping preserve spatial replication through more efficient sampling. The capacity to explicitly estimate nest success together with breeding occupancy should lead to improved understanding of breeding productivity and the mechanisms of population change.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Landscape heterogeneity and pesticide reduction favor predation, but also grape infestation by Lobesia botrana","authors":"Axelle Tortosa,&nbsp;Aude Vialatte,&nbsp;Fabien Laroche,&nbsp;Adrien Rusch,&nbsp;Martin H. Entling,&nbsp;Brice Giffard","doi":"10.1002/eap.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Biological pest control is a major ecosystem service and is known to depend on landscape heterogeneity. The composition and configuration of landscapes can affect natural enemy communities, trophic interactions, and pest density within agroecosystems. However, local agricultural management can interfere with natural enemy activity, so the positive effects of landscape heterogeneity may be disrupted by farming practices. Here, we studied the influence of landscape context and management options on the biological control of <i>Lobesia botrana</i>, one of the main insect pests of grapes. We focused on two complementary measures: predation rates, which reflect part of biological control potential, and plant damage, which reflects pest density and the associated infestation. We used a set of sentinel prey (eggs, caterpillars, pupae) to quantify predation rates across different developmental stages of the pest. The study was carried out in a landscape-scale experimental set-up consisting of 38 vineyards in Southwestern France. Using structural equation models, we show that predation rates on sentinel prey were affected by both landscape heterogeneity and local management practices. Higher pest predation rates were observed in landscapes with smaller vineyards and in vineyards with low applications of synthetic pesticides. We observed limited relationships between predation rates and grape infestation levels. However, our results suggest that predation rates at the pest pupae stage are significantly shaping infestation levels. Additionally, pest damage in spring and summer was primarily influenced by the intensity of local pesticide use and the grass cover in the field and exacerbated by the decreasing size of vineyards, while semi-natural habitats had no effect on pest damage. We conclude that links between <i>L. botrana</i> infestation and biological control potential appear tenuous in our study region. This is likely due to the high local management intensity, as evidenced by the negative association observed between pesticide applications and predation rates. Nevertheless, both predation and infestation respond to landscape or field heterogeneity and pesticide use. Reducing the use of pesticides should be combined with multi-scale diversification measures at field and landscape levels to amplify the predation potential.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.70045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Elevated fish growth yet postponed maturation during intense marine heatwaves","authors":"R. Claire Rosemond,&nbsp;Melissa A. Head,&nbsp;Scott A. Heppell","doi":"10.1002/eap.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the last decade, the northeast Pacific Ocean has experienced new climatic extremes with the occurrence of several marine heatwaves (MHWs), prolonged periods of warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures, likely as a result of anthropogenic climate change. The temperature-size rule is used to contextualize the impacts of climate change on fish maturity and growth, and predicts earlier maturation, faster growth of juveniles, and smaller adult body sizes with increasing temperatures. We investigated the temporal dynamics of fish reproductive development, maturity, and growth from 2014 to 2021, during intense and less intense MHW conditions. We estimated length and age at 50% maturity with histological sections of ovarian tissue samples collected from 644 female Black Rockfish (<i>Sebastes melanops</i>) caught off the Pacific Coast of the United States (42° N–49° N) and estimated von Bertalanffy growth function parameters with length-at-age data for a subset of 302 females. During intense MHWs, maturation was postponed, reproductive success was lower by a third, and parasite prevalence in ovaries was nominally higher. Younger females were larger at age during intense MHWs, and throughout the last decade, growth rate coefficients were higher than what is typically expected for slower-growing fishes, like rockfishes. The increase in juvenile growth during intense MHW conditions may be explained by the temperature-size rule, but our observation of postponed maturation contradicts theoretical predictions. Our work reveals that MHWs can induce shifts in fish growth and maturation, but that the temperature-size rule may not provide an adequate framework to predict how increasing temperatures associated with climate change may influence reproductive development and maturity for fishes with complex reproductive strategies. An understanding of how anomalous environmental conditions interact with fish life histories may help predict population vulnerability, which will be critical for future fisheries management under climate change.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.70033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Biotic resistance across a nutrient gradient in experimental wetland mesocosms","authors":"Clementina Calvo,&nbsp;Kenneth J. Elgersma,&nbsp;Deborah E. Goldberg,&nbsp;William S. Currie,&nbsp;Evan Batzer,&nbsp;Jason P. Martina","doi":"10.1002/eap.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Anthropogenic degradation of wetlands often leads to regional biotic homogenization and reduced plant diversity. This reduction is often attributed to the proliferation and dominance of a few generalist, often non-native, species. Biotic resistance from natives can sometimes impede the growth and spread of colonizers, but its dependence on environmental conditions is poorly understood. Based on field and modeling studies, we tested the predictions that (1) biotic resistance declines at higher nitrogen loading and (2) size influences colonization success. In a five-growing season mesocosm experiment, we grew three cattail taxa: <i>Typha latifolia</i> (native, large), <i>Typha angustifolia</i> (non-native, invasive, smallest), and <i>Typha</i> × <i>glauca</i> (hybrid, most invasive, large) as potential colonizers in the presence or absence of pre-established resident vegetation. At two sites differing in climate and growing season length, biotic resistance treatments were crossed with 12 nitrogen levels (inflows 0–45 g N m⁻² year⁻¹). Each treatment combination was replicated twice, totaling 48 mesocosms per site. Without residents, colonizers (as total biomass of all three cattail taxa) persisted and expanded clonally across all nitrogen levels. However, their expansion was generally lower when colonizing a pre-established resident community compare to bare ground. The magnitude of biotic resistance, measured as the effect of residents on colonizers' biomass, and its interaction with nitrogen differed between sites. As predicted, biotic resistance decreased with high nitrogen at the northern site, but at the southern site, residents nearly eliminated colonizers. As anticipated, smaller <i>T. angustifolia</i> was a poorer colonizer than the other taxa, while <i>T.</i> × <i>glauca</i> was the strongest colonizer, especially under high nitrogen conditions where biotic resistance was minimal. Our findings partially support the hypothesis that biotic resistance declines with nitrogen loading, indicating that additional research on the factors influencing the magnitude of biotic resistance is needed. Importantly, when combined with our finding that <i>Typha</i> can persist at all nutrient levels when natives are absent, this information could help identify wetlands particularly vulnerable to invasion, especially in environments experiencing concurrent nutrient enrichment and disturbances that expose bare ground.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}

{"title":"Decadal change in seabird-driven isotopes on islands with differing invasion histories","authors":"Penelope P. Pascoe,&nbsp;Mitchell Bartlett,&nbsp;Justine Shaw,&nbsp;Rowan Trebilco,&nbsp;Christine K. Weldrick,&nbsp;Holly P. Jones","doi":"10.1002/eap.70030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70030","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Invasive mammal eradications are commonplace in island conservation. However, post-eradication monitoring beyond the confirmation of target species removal is rarer. Seabirds are ecosystem engineers on islands and are negatively affected by invasive mammals. Following an invasive mammal eradication, the recovery of seabird populations can be necessary for wider ecosystem recovery. Seabirds fertilize islands with isotopically heavy nitrogen, which means that nitrogen stable isotope analysis (δ¹⁵N) could provide a useful means for assessing corresponding change in ecosystem function. We quantified decadal changes in δ¹⁵N on eight temperate New Zealand islands subject in pairs to distinct mammal invasion and seabird restoration histories: invaded, never-invaded, invader-eradicated, and undergoing active seabird restoration. First, we investigated long-term changes in δ¹⁵N values on individual islands. Second, we used a space-for-time analysis to determine whether δ¹⁵N levels on islands from which invaders had been removed eventually recovered to values typical of never-invaded islands. On each island, soil, plants (<i>Coprosma repens</i>, <i>Coprosma robusta</i>, and <i>Myrsine australis</i>), and spiders (Porrhothelidae) were sampled in 2006/2007 and 2022, allowing δ¹⁵N change on individual islands over 16 years to be assessed. Combined, the samples from invader-eradicated islands provided a 7- to32-year post-eradication dataset. Change in δ¹⁵N was only detected on one island across the study period, following the unexpected recolonization of seabirds to an invaded island. Invader-eradicated islands generally had higher δ¹⁵N values than invaded islands; however, they were still lower than never-invaded islands, and there was no trend in δ¹⁵N with time since eradication. This, and the measurable increase in δ¹⁵N following seabird recolonization on one island, may suggest that δ¹⁵N change occurs rapidly following invader eradication but then slows, with δ¹⁵N values staying relatively constant in the time period studied here. Isotope and seabird population studies need to be coupled to ascertain whether plateauing in δ¹⁵N reflects a slowing of seabird population growth and subsequent basal nutrient input or whether the baseline nutrients are entering the ecosystem but then not propagating up the food web.</p>","PeriodicalId":55168,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Applications","volume":"35 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eap.70030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"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}